‘But I can’t — —’
‘She’s a nice girl, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, very.’
‘And you like her, don’t you?’
‘Very much. Her father was my father’s best friend.’
‘I don’t believe in atavism,’ observed the American, ‘but that’s neither here nor there. You know what you wrote me. Do you believe she’ll be miserable with Logotheti or not?’
‘I think she will,’ Lady Maud answered truthfully. ‘But I may be wrong.’
‘No; you’re right. I know it. But marriage is a gamble anyway, as you know better than any one. Are you equally sure that she would be miserable with me? Dead sure, I mean.’
‘No, I’m not sure. But that’s not a reason — —’
‘It’s a first-rate reason. I care for that lady, and I want her to be happy, and as you admit that she will have a better chance of happiness with me than with Logotheti, I’m going to marry her myself, not only because I want to, but because it will be a long sight better for her. See? No fault in that line of reasoning, is there?’
‘So far as reasoning goes — —’ Lady Maud’s tone was half an admission.
‘That’s all I wanted you to say,’ interrupted the American. ‘So that’s settled, and you’re going to help me.’
‘No,’ answered Lady Maud quietly; ‘I won’t help you to break off that engagement. But if it should come to nothing, without your interfering — that is, by the girl’s own free will and choice and change of mind, I’d help you to marry her if I could.’
‘But you admit that she’s going to be miserable,’ said Van Torp stubbornly.
‘I’m sorry for her, but it’s none of my business. It’s not honourable to try and make trouble between engaged people, no matter how ill-matched they may be.’
‘Funny idea of honour,’ observed the American, ‘that you’re bound to let a friend of yours break her neck at the very gravel pit where you were nearly smashed yourself! In the hunting field you’d grab her bridle if she wouldn’t listen to you, but in a matter of marriage — oh, no! “It’s dishonourable to interfere,” “She’s made her choice and she must abide by it,” and all that kind of stuff!’
Lady Maud’s clear eyes met his angry blue ones calmly.
‘I don’t like you when you say such things,’ she said, lowering her voice a little.
‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ answered the millionaire, almost humbly. ‘You see I don’t always know. I learnt things differently from what you did. I suppose you’d think it an insult if I said I’d give a large sum of money to your charity the day I married Madame Cordova, if you’d help me through.’
“‘Funny idea of honour,’ observed the American.”
‘Please stop.’ Lady Maud’s face darkened visibly. ‘That’s not like you.’
‘I’ll give a million pounds sterling,’ said Mr. Van Torp slowly.
Lady Maud leaned back in her corner of the sofa, clasping her hands rather tightly together in her lap. Her white throat flushed as when the light of dawn kisses Parian marble, and the fresh tint in her cheeks deepened softly; her lips were tightly shut, her eyelids quivered a little, and she looked straight before her across the room.
‘You can do a pretty good deal with a million pounds,’ said Mr. Van Torp, after the silence had lasted nearly half a minute.
‘Don’t!’ cried Lady Maud, in an odd voice.
‘Forty thousand pounds a year,’ observed the millionaire thoughtfully. ‘You could do quite a great deal of good with that, couldn’t you?’
‘Don’t! Please don’t!’
She pressed her hands to her ears and rose at the same instant. Perhaps it was she, after all, and not her friend who had been brought suddenly to a great cross-road in life. She stood still one moment by the sofa without looking down at her companion; then she left the room abruptly, and shut the door behind her.
Van Torp got up from his seat slowly when she was gone, and went to the window, softly blowing a queer tune between his closed teeth and his open lips, without quite whistling.
‘Well — —’ he said aloud, in a tone of doubt, after a minute or two.
But he said no more, for he was much too reticent and sensible a person to talk to himself audibly even when he was alone, and much too cautious to be sure that a servant might not be within hearing, though the door was shut. He stood before the window nearly a quarter of an hour, thinking that Lady Maud might come back, but as no sound of any step broke the silence he understood that he was not to see her again that day, and he quietly let himself out of the house and went off, not altogether discontented with the extraordinary impression he had made.
Lady Maud sat alone upstairs, so absorbed in her thoughts that she did not hear the click of the lock as he opened and shut the front door.
She was much more amazed at herself than surprised by the offer he had made. Temptation, in any reasonable sense of the word, had passed by her in life, and she had never before understood what it could mean to her. Indeed, she had thought of herself very little of late, and had never had the least taste for self-examination or the analysis of her conscience. She had done much good, because she wanted to do it, and not at all as a duty, or with that idea of surprising the Deity by the amount of her good works, which actuates many excellent persons. As for doing anything seriously wrong, she had never wanted to, and it had not even occurred to her that the opportunity for a wicked deed could ever present itself to her together with the slightest desire to do it. Her labours had taken her to strange places, and she knew what real sin was, and even crime, and the most hideous vice, and its still more awful consequences; but one reason why she had wrought fearlessly was that she felt herself naturally invulnerable. She knew a good many people in her own set whom she thought quite as bad as the worst she had ever picked up on the dark side of the Virtue-Curtain; they were people who seemed to have no moral sense, men who betrayed their wives wantonly, young women who took money for themselves and old ones who cheated at bridge, men who would deliberately ruin a rival in politics, in finance, or in love, and ambitious women who had driven their competitors to despair and destruction by a scientific use of calumny. But she had never felt any inclination towards any of those things, which all seemed to her disgusting, or cowardly, or otherwise abominable. Her husband had gone astray after strange gods — and goddesses — but she had never wished to be revenged on them, or him, nor to say what was not true about any one, nor even what was true and could hurt, nor to win a few sovereigns at cards otherwise than fairly, nor to wish anybody dead who had a right to live.
She was eight-and-twenty years of age and a widow, when temptation came to her suddenly in a shape of tremendous strength, through her trusted friend, who had helped her for years to help others. It was real temptation. The man who offered her a million pounds to save miserable wretches from a life of unspeakable horror, could offer her twice as much, four, five, or ten millions perhaps. No one knew the vast extent of his wealth, and in an age of colossal fortunes she had often heard his spoken of with the half-dozen greatest.
The worst of it was that she felt able to do what he asked; for she was inwardly convinced that the great singer did not know her own mind and was not profoundly attached to the man she had accepted. Of the two women, Margaret was by far the weaker character; or, to be just, the whole strength of her nature had long been concentrated in the struggle for artistic supremacy, and could not easily be brought to exert itself in other directions. Lady Maud’s influence over her was great, and Logotheti’s had never been very strong. She was taken by his vitality, his daring, his constancy, or obstinacy, and a little by his good looks, as a mere girl might be, because the theatre had made looks seem so important to her. But apart from his handsome face, Logotheti was no match for Van Torp. Of that Lady Maud was sure. Besides, the Primadonna’s antipathy for the American had greatly diminished of late, and had perhaps altogether given place to a friendly feeling. She had said op
enly that she had misjudged him, because he had pestered her with his attentions in New York, and that she even liked him since he had shown more tact. Uncouth as he was in some ways, Lady Maud knew that she herself might care for him more than as a friend, if her heart were not buried for ever in a soldier’s grave on the Veldt.
That was the worst of it. She felt that it was probably not beyond her power to bring about what Van Torp desired, at least so far as to induce Margaret to break off the engagement which now blocked his way. Under cover of roughness, too, he had argued with a subtlety that frightened her now that she was alone; and with a consummate knowledge of her nature he had offered her the only sort of bribe that could possibly tempt her, the means to make permanent the good work she had already carried so far.
He had placed her in such a dilemma as she had never dreamed of. To accept such an offer as he made, would mean that she must do something which she felt was dishonourable, if she gave ‘honour’ the meaning an honest gentleman attaches to it, and that was the one she had learned from her father, and which a good many women seem unable to understand. To refuse, was to deprive hundreds of wretched and suffering creatures of the only means of obtaining a hold on a decent existence which Lady Maud had ever found to be at all efficacious. She knew that she had not done much, compared with what was undone; it looked almost nothing. But where law-making had failed altogether, where religion was struggling bravely but almost in vain, where enlightened philanthropy found itself paralysed and bankrupt, she had accomplished something by merely using a little money in the right way.
‘You can do quite a great deal of good with forty thousand pounds a year.’
Van Torp’s rough-hewn speech rang through her head, and somehow its reckless grammar gave it strength and made it stick in her memory, word for word. In the drawer of the writing-table before which she was sitting there was a little file of letters that meant more to her than anything else in the world, except one dear memory. They were all from women, they all told much the same little story, and it was good to read. She had made many failures, and some terrible ones, which she could never forget; but there were real successes, too, there were over a dozen of them now, and she had only been at work for three years. If she had more money, she could do more; if she had much, she could do much; and she knew of one or two women who could help her. What might she not accomplish in a lifetime with the vast sum her friend offered her! — the price of hindering a marriage that was almost sure to turn out badly, perhaps as badly as her own! — the money value of a compromise with her conscience on a point of honour which many women would have thought very vague indeed, if not quite absurd in such a case. She knew what temptation meant, now, and she was to know even better before long. The Primadonna had said that she was going to marry Logotheti chiefly because he insisted on it.
The duel for Margaret’s hand had begun; Van Torp had aimed a blow that might well give him the advantage if it went home; and Logotheti himself was quite unaware of the skilful attack that threatened his happiness.
CHAPTER III
A FEW DAYS after she had talked with Lady Maud, and before Mr. Van Torp’s arrival, Margaret had gone abroad, without waiting for the promised advice in the matter of the wedding-gown. With admirable regard for the proprieties she had quite declined to let Logotheti cross the Channel with her, but had promised to see him at Versailles, where she was going to stop a few days with her mother’s old American friend, the excellent Mrs. Rushmore, with whom she meant to go to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal for the first time.
Mrs. Rushmore had disapproved profoundly of Margaret’s career, from the first. After Mrs. Donne’s death, she had taken the forlorn girl under her protection, and had encouraged her to go on with what she vaguely called her ‘music lessons.’ The good lady was one of those dear, old-fashioned, kind, delicate-minded and golden-hearted American women we may never see again, now that ‘progress’ has got civilisation by the throat and is squeezing the life out of it. She called Margaret her ‘chickabiddy’ and spread a motherly wing over her, without the least idea that she was rearing a valuable lyric nightingale that would not long be content to trill and quaver unheard.
Immense and deserved success had half reconciled the old lady to what had happened, and after all Margaret had not married an Italian tenor, a Russian prince, or a Parisian composer, the three shapes of man which seemed the most dreadfully immoral to Mrs. Rushmore. She would find it easier to put up with Logotheti than with one of those, though it was bad enough to think of her old friend’s daughter marrying a Greek instead of a nice, clean Anglo-Saxon, like the learned Mr. Donne, the girl’s father, or the good Mr. Rushmore, her lamented husband, who had been an upright pillar of the church in New York, and the president of a Trust Company that could be trusted.
After all, though she thought all Greeks must be what she called ‘designing,’ the name of Konstantin Logotheti was associated with everything that was most honourable in the financial world, and this impressed Mrs. Rushmore very much. Her harmless weakness had always been for lions, and none but the most genuine ones were allowed to roar at her garden-parties or at her dinner table. When the Greek financier had first got himself introduced to her more than two years earlier, she had made the most careful inquiries about him and had diligently searched the newspapers for every mention of him during a whole month. The very first paragraph she had found was about a new railway which he had taken under his protection, and the writer said that his name was a guarantee of good faith. This impressed her favourably, though the journalist might have had reasons for making precisely the same statement if he had known Logotheti to be a fraudulent promoter. One of the maxims she had learned in her youth, which had been passed in the Golden Age of old New York, was that ‘business was a test of character.’ Mr. Rushmore used to say that, so it must be true, she thought; and indeed the excellent man might have said with equal wisdom that long-continued rain generally produces dampness. He would have turned in his well-kept grave if he could have heard a Wall Street cynic say that nowadays an honest man may get a bare living, and a drunkard has been known to get rich, but that integrity and whisky together will inevitably land anybody in the workhouse.
Logotheti was undoubtedly considered honest, however, and Mrs. Rushmore made quite sure of it, as well as of the fact that he had an immense fortune. So far as the cynic’s observation goes, it may not be equally applicable everywhere, any more than it is true that all Greeks are blacklegs, as the Parisians are fond of saying, or that all Parisians are much worse, as their own novelists try to make out. If anything is more worthless than most men’s opinion of themselves, it is their opinion of others, and it is unfortunately certain that the people who understand human nature best, and lead it whither they will, are not those that labour to save souls or to cure sickness, but demagogues, quacks, fashionable dressmakers, and money-lenders. Mrs. Rushmore was a judge of lions, but she knew nothing about humanity.
At Versailles, with its memories of her earlier youth, the Primadonna wished to be Margaret Donne again, and to forget for the time that she was the Cordova, whose name was always first on the opera posters in New York, London, and Vienna; who covered her face with grease-paint two or three times a week; who loved the indescribable mixed smell of boards, glue, scenery, Manila ropes and cotton-velvet-clad chorus, behind the scenes; who lived on applause, was made miserable now and then by a criticism which any other singer would have thought flattery, and who was, in fact, an extraordinary compound of genius and simplicity, generosity and tetchiness, tremendous energy in one direction and intellectual torpidity and total indifference in all others. If she could have gone directly from Covent Garden to another engagement, the other self would not have waked up just then; but she meant to take a long holiday, and in order not to miss the stage too much, it was indispensable to forget it for a while.
She travelled incognito. That is to say, she had sent her first maid and theatrical dresser Alphonsine to see her relations in Na
ncy for a month, and only brought the other with her; she had, moreover, caused the stateroom on the Channel boat to be taken in the name of Miss Donne, and she brought no more luggage to Versailles than could be piled on an ordinary cart, whereas when she had last come from New York her servants had seen eighty-seven pieces put on board the steamer, and a hat-box had been missing after all.
Mrs. Rushmore came out to meet her on the steps in the hot sunshine, portly and kind as ever, and she applied an embrace which was affectionate, yet imposing.
‘My dearest child!’ she cried. ‘I was sure I had not quite lost you yet!’
‘I hope you will never think you have,’ Margaret answered, almost quite in her girlish voice of old.
She was very glad to come back. As soon as they were alone in the cool drawing-room, Mrs. Rushmore asked her about her engagement in a tone of profound concern, as though it were a grave bodily ailment which might turn out to be fatal.
‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ Margaret answered with a little laugh; ‘I’m not married yet!’
The elderly face brightened.
‘Do you mean to say that — that there is any hope?’ she asked eagerly.
Margaret laughed now, but in a gentle and affectionate sort of way.
‘Perhaps, just a little! But don’t ask me, please. I’ve come home — this is always home for me, isn’t it? — I’ve come home to forget everything for a few weeks.’
‘Thank heaven!’ ejaculated Mrs. Rushmore in a tone of deep relief. ‘Then if — if he should call this afternoon, or even to-morrow — may I tell them to say that you are out?’
She was losing no time; and Margaret laughed again, though she put her head a little on one side with an expression of doubt.
‘I can’t refuse to see him,’ she said, ‘though really I would much rather be alone with you for a day or two.’
‘My darling child!’ cried Mrs. Rushmore, applying another embrace, ‘you shall! Leave it to me!’
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1231