‘A present may be a charity,’ said Lady Maud, still thoughtful.
‘Yes,’ answered Mr. Van Torp. ‘It may be, but it isn’t always.’
He walked twice the length of the room before he spoke again.
‘Do you think it’s really to be war this time?’ he asked, stopping beside the table. ‘Because if it is, I’ll see a lawyer before I go to Derbyshire.’
Lady Maud looked up with a bright smile. Clearly she had been thinking of something compared with which the divorce court was a delightful contrast.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It must come sooner or later, because he wants to be free to marry that woman, and as he has not the courage to cut my throat, he must divorce me — if he can!’
‘I’ve sometimes thought he might take the shorter way,’ said Van Torp.
‘He?’ Lady Maud almost laughed, but her companion looked grave.
‘There’s a thing called homicidal mania,’ he said. ‘Didn’t he shoot a boy in Russia a year ago?’
‘A young man — one of the beaters. But that was an accident.’
‘I’m not so sure. How about that poor dog at the Theobalds’ last September?’
‘He thought the creature was mad,’ Lady Maud explained.
‘He knows as well as you do that there’s no rabies in the British Isles,’ objected Mr. Van Torp. ‘Count Leven never liked that dog for some reason, and he shot him the first time he got a chance. He’s always killing things. Some day he’ll kill you, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t think so,’ answered the lady carelessly. ‘If he does, I hope he’ll do it neatly! I should hate to be maimed or mangled.’
‘Do you know it makes me uncomfortable to hear you talk like that? I wish you wouldn’t! You can’t deny that your husband’s half a lunatic, anyway. He was behaving like one here only a quarter of an hour ago, and it’s no use denying it.’
‘But I’m not denying anything!’
‘No, I know you’re not,’ said Mr. Van Torp. ‘If you don’t know how crazy he is, I don’t suppose any one else does. But your nerves are better than mine, as I told you. The idea of killing anything makes me uncomfortable, and when it comes to thinking that he really might murder you some day — well, I can’t stand it, that’s all! If I didn’t know that you lock your door at night I shouldn’t sleep, sometimes. You do lock it, always, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes!’
‘Be sure you do to-night. I wonder whether he is in earnest about the divorce this time, or whether the whole scene was just bluff, to get my money.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Lady Maud, rising. ‘He needs money, I believe, but I’m not sure that he would try to get it just in that way.’
‘Too bad? Even for him?’
‘Oh dear, no! Too simple! He’s a tortuous person.’
‘He tried to pocket those notes with a good deal of directness!’ observed Mr. Van Torp.
‘Yes. That was an opportunity that turned up unexpectedly, but he didn’t know it would. How could he? He didn’t come here expecting to find thousands of pounds lying about on the table! It was easy enough to know that I was here, of course. I couldn’t go out of my own house on foot, in a dinner-gown, and pick up a hansom, could I? I had one called and gave the address, and the footman remembered it and told my husband. There’s nothing more foolish than making mysteries and giving the cabman first one address and then another. If Boris is really going to bring a suit, the mere fact that there was no concealment as to where I was going this evening would be strong evidence, wouldn’t it? Evidence he cannot deny, too, since he must have learnt the address from the footman, who heard me give it! And people who make no secret of a meeting are not meeting clandestinely, are they?’
‘You argue that pretty well,’ said Mr. Van Torp, smiling.
‘And besides,’ rippled Lady Maud’s sweet voice, as she shook out the folds of her black velvet, ‘I don’t care.’
Her friend held up the fur-lined cloak and put it over her shoulders. She fastened it at the neck and then turned to the fire for a moment before leaving.
‘Rufus,’ she said gravely, after a moment’s pause, and looking down at the coals, ‘you’re an angel.’
‘The others in the game don’t think so,’ answered Mr. Van Torp.
‘No one was ever so good to a woman as you’ve been to me,’ said Maud.
And all at once the joyful ring had died away from her voice and there was another tone in it that was sweet and low too, but sad and tender and grateful, all at once.
‘There’s nothing to thank me for,’ answered Mr. Van Torp. ‘I’ve often told you so. But I have a good deal of reason to be grateful to you for all you’ve given me.’
‘Nonsense!’ returned the lady, and the sadness was gone again, but not all the tenderness. ‘I must be going,’ she added a moment later, turning away from the fire.
‘I’ll take you to the Embassy in a hansom,’ said the millionaire, slipping on his overcoat.
‘No. You mustn’t do that — we should be sure to meet some one at the door. Are you going anywhere in particular? I’ll drop you wherever you like, and then go on. It will give us a few minutes more together.’
‘Goodness knows we don’t get too many!’
‘No, indeed!’
So the two went down the dismal stairs of the house in Hare Court together.
CHAPTER VI
THE POSITION OF a successful lyric primadonna with regard to other artists and the rest of the world is altogether exceptional, and is not easy to explain. Her value for purposes of advertisement apparently exceeds that of any other popular favourite, not to mention the majority of royal personages. A respectable publisher has been known to bring out a book in which he did not believe, solely because a leading lyric soprano promised him to say in an interview that it was the book of the year. Countless brands of cigars, cigarettes, wines and liquors, have been the fashion with the flash crowd that frequents public billiard-rooms and consumes unlimited tobacco and drink, merely because some famous ‘Juliet’ or ‘Marguerite’ has ‘consented’ to lend her name to the articles in question; and half the grog-shops on both sides of the Atlantic display to the admiring street the most alarming pink and white caricatures, or monstrously enlarged photographs, of the three or four celebrated lyric sopranos who happen to be before the public at any one time. In the popular mind those artists represent something which they themselves do not always understand. There is a legend about each; she is either an angel of purity and light, or a beautiful monster of iniquity; she has turned the heads of kings— ‘kings’ in a vaguely royal plural — completely round on their shoulders, or she has built out of her earnings a hospital for crippled children; the watery-sentimental eye of the flash crowd in its cups sees in her a Phryne, a Mrs. Fry, or a Saint Cecilia. Goethe said that every man must be either the hammer or the anvil; the billiard-room public is sure that every primadonna is a siren or a martyred wife, or else a public benefactress, unless she is all three by turns, which is even more interesting.
In any case, the reporters are sure that every one wants to know just what she thinks about everything. In the United States, for instance, her opinion on political matters is often asked, and is advertised with ‘scare-heads’ that would stop a funeral or arrest the attention of a man on his way to the gallows.
Then, too, she has her ‘following’ of ‘girls,’ thousands of whom have her photograph, or her autograph, or both, and believe in her, and are ready to scratch out the eyes of any older person who suggests that she is not perfection in every way, or that to be a primadonna like her ought not to be every girl’s highest ambition. They not only worship her, but many of them make real sacrifices to hear her sing; for most of them are anything but well off, and to hear an opera means living without little luxuries, and sometimes without necessaries, for days together. Their devotion to their idol is touching and true; and she knows it and is good-natured in the matter of autographs for them, and talks about ‘my ma
tinée girls’ to the reporters, as if those eleven thousand virgins and more were all her younger sisters and nieces. An actress, even the most gifted, has no such ‘following.’ The greatest dramatic sopranos that ever sing Brunhilde and Kundry enjoy no such popularity. It belongs exclusively to the nightingale primadonnas, whose voices enchant the ear if they do not always stir the blood. It may be explicable, but no explanation is at all necessary, since the fact cannot be disputed.
To this amazing popularity Margaret Donne had now attained; and she was known to the matinée girls’ respectful admiration as Madame Cordova, to the public generally and to her comrades as Cordova, to sentimental paragraph-writers as Fair Margaret, and to her friends as Miss Donne, or merely as Margaret. Indeed, from the name each person gave her in speaking of her, it was easy to know the class to which each belonged.
She had bought a house in London, because in her heart she still thought England the finest country in the world, and had never felt the least desire to live anywhere else. She had few relations left and none whom she saw; for her father, the Oxford scholar, had not had money, and they all looked with disapproval on the career she had chosen. Besides, she had been very little in England since her parents’ death. Her mother’s American friend, the excellent Mrs. Rushmore, who had taken her under her wing, was now in Versailles, where she had a house, and Margaret actually had the audacity to live alone, rather than burden herself with a tiresome companion.
Her courage in doing so was perhaps mistaken, considering what the world is and what it generally thinks of the musical and theatrical professions; and Mrs. Rushmore, who was quite powerless to influence Margaret’s conduct, did not at all approve of it. The girl’s will had always been strong, and her immense success had so little weakened her belief in herself, or softened her character, that she had grown almost too independent. The spirit of independence is not a fault in women, but it is a defect in the eyes of men. Darwin has proved that the dominant characteristic of male animals is vanity; and what is to become of that if women show that they can do without us? If the emancipation of woman had gone on as it began when we were boys, we should by this time be importing wives for our sons from Timbuctoo or the Friendly Islands. Happily, women are practical beings who rarely stray far from the narrow path along which usefulness and pleasure may still go hand in hand; for considering how much most women do that is useful, the amount of pleasure they get out of life is perfectly amazing; and when we try to keep up with them in the chase after amusement we are surprised at the number of useful things they accomplish without effort in twenty-four hours.
But, indeed, women are to us very like the moon, which has shown the earth only one side of herself since the beginning, though she has watched and studied our world from all its sides through uncounted ages. We men are alternately delighted, humiliated, and terrified when women anticipate our wishes, perceive our weaknesses, and detect our shortcomings, whether we be frisky young colts in the field or sober stagers plodding along between the matrimonial shafts in harness and blinkers. We pride ourselves on having the strength to smash the shafts, shake off the harness, and kick the cart to pieces if we choose, and there are men who can and do. But the man does not live who knows what the dickens women are up to when he is going quietly along the road, as a good horse should. Sometimes they are driving us, and then there is no mistake about it; and sometimes they are just sitting in the cart and dozing, and we can tell that they are behind us by their weight; but very often we are neither driven by them nor are we dragging them, and we really have not the faintest idea where they are, so that we are reduced to telling ourselves, with a little nervousness which we do not care to acknowledge, that it is noble and beautiful to trust what we love.
A part of the great feminine secret is the concealment of that independence about which there has been so much talk in our time. As for suffrage, wherever there is such a thing, the woman who does not vote always controls far more men’s votes than the woman who goes to the polls, and has only her own vote to give.
Margaret, the primadonna, did not want to vote for or against anything; but she was a little too ready to assert that she could and would lead her own life as she pleased, without danger to her good name, because she had never done anything to be ashamed of. The natural consequence was that she was gradually losing something which is really much more worth having than commonplace, technical independence. Her friend Lushington realised the change as soon as she landed, and it hurt him to see it, because it seemed to him a great pity that what he had thought an ideal, and therefore a natural manifestation of art, should be losing the fine outlines that had made it perfect to his devoted gaze. But this was not all. His rather over-strung moral sense was offended as well as his artistic taste. He felt that Margaret was blunting the sensibilities of her feminine nature and wronging a part of herself, and that the delicate bloom of girlhood was opening to a blossom that was somewhat too evidently strong, a shade too vivid and more brilliant than beautiful.
There were times when she reminded him of his mother, and those were some of the most painful moments of his present life. It is true that compared with Madame Bonanni in her prime, as he remembered her, Margaret was as a lily of the valley to a giant dahlia; yet when he recalled the sweet and healthy English girl he had known and loved in Versailles three years ago, the vision was delicate and fairy-like beside the strong reality of the successful primadonna. She was so very sure of herself now, and so fully persuaded that she was not accountable to any one for her doings, her tastes, or the choice of her friends! If not actually like Madame Bonanni, she was undoubtedly beginning to resemble two or three of her famous rivals in the profession who were nearer to her own age. Her taste did not run in the direction of white fox cloaks, named diamonds, and imperial jade plates; she did not use a solid gold toothbrush with emeralds set in the handle, like Ismail Pacha; bridge did not amuse her at all, nor could she derive pleasure from playing at Monte Carlo; she did not even keep an eighty-horse-power motor-car worth five thousand pounds. Paul Griggs, who was old-fashioned, called motor-cars ‘sudden-death carts,’ and Margaret was inclined to agree with him. She cared for none of these things.
Nevertheless there was a quiet thoroughgoing luxury in her existence, an unseen private extravagance, such as Rufus Van Torp, the millionaire, had never dreamt of. She had first determined to be a singer in order to support herself, because she had been cheated of a fortune by old Alvah Moon; but before she had actually made her début a handsome sum had been recovered for her, and though she was not exactly what is now called rich, she was at least extremely well off, apart from her professional earnings, which were very large indeed. In the certainty that if her voice failed she would always have a more than sufficient income for the rest of her life, and considering that she was not under the obligation of supporting a number of poor relations, it was not surprising that she should spend a great deal of money on herself.
It is not every one who can be lavish without going a little beyond the finely-drawn boundary which divides luxury from extravagance; for useless profusion is by nature as contrary to what is aesthetic as fat in the wrong place, and is quite as sure to be seen. To spend well what rich people are justified in expending over and above an ample provision for the necessities and reasonable comforts of a large existence is an art in itself, and the modest muse of good taste loves not the rich man for his riches, nor the successful primadonna for the thousands she has a right to throw away if she likes.
Mr. Van Torp vaguely understood this, without at all guessing how the great artist spent her money. He had understood at least enough to hinder him from trying to dazzle her in the beginning of the New York season, when he had brought siege against her.
A week after her arrival in London, Margaret was alone at her piano and Lushington was announced. Unlike the majority of musicians in real fiction she had not been allowing her fingers to ‘wander over the keys,’ a relaxation that not seldom leads to outer darkness,
where the consecutive fifth plays hide-and-seek with the falling sub-tonic to superinduce gnashing of teeth in them that hear. Margaret was learning her part in the Elisir d’Amore, and instead of using her voice she was whistling from the score and playing the accompaniment. The old opera was to be revived during the coming season with her and the great Pompeo Stromboli, and she was obliged to work hard to have it ready.
The music-room had a polished wooden floor, and the furniture consisted chiefly of a grand piano and a dozen chairs. The walls were tinted a pale green; there were no curtains at the windows, because they would have deadened sound, and a very small wood fire was burning in an almost miniature fireplace quite at the other end of the room. The sun had not quite set yet, and as the blinds were still open, a lurid glare came in from the western sky, over the houses on the opposite side of the wide square. There had been a heavy shower, but the streets were already drying. One shaded electric lamp stood on the desk of the piano, and the rest of the room was illuminated by the yellowish daylight.
Margaret was very much absorbed in her work, and did not hear the door open; but the servant came slowly towards her, purposely making his steps heard on the wooden floor in order to attract her attention. When she stopped playing and whistling, and looked round, the man said that Mr. Lushington was downstairs.
‘Ask him to come up,’ she answered, without hesitation.
She rose from the piano, went to the window and looked out at the smoky sunset.
Lushington entered the room in a few moments and saw only the outline of her graceful figure, as if she were cut out in black against the glare from the big window. She turned, and a little of the shaded light from the piano fell upon her face, just enough to show him her expression, and though her glad smile welcomed him, there was anxiety in her brown eyes. He came forward, fair and supernaturally neat, as ever, and much more self-possessed than in former days. It was not their first meeting since she had landed, for he had been to see her late in the afternoon on the day of her arrival, and she had expected him; but she had felt a sort of constraint in his manner then, which was new to her, and they had talked for half an hour about indifferent things. Moreover, he had refused a second cup of tea, which was a sure sign that something was wrong. So she had asked him to come again a week later, naming the day, and she had been secretly disappointed because he did not protest against being put off so long. She wondered what had happened, for his letters, his cable to her when she had left America, and the flowers he had managed to send on board the steamer, had made her believe that he had not changed since they had parted before Christmas.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1205