‘I think it matters a great deal,’ he grumbled, as he carefully skinned the fine peach on his plate, and commenced to appreciate its flavour. ‘I hate to have my movements forestalled and advertised by the Press. And, as far as you are concerned, I am sure I heartily wish you were not a public character.’
She opened her eyes a little.
‘Do you? Since when? Since you became Lord Carlyon? My dear boy, if a trumpery little handle to your name is going to make you ashamed of your wife’s reputation as an author, I think it’s a great pity you ever succeeded to the title.’
‘Oh, I know you don’t care a bit about it,’ he said, keeping his gaze on the juicy peach; ‘but other people appreciate it.’
‘What other people?’ queried Delicia, laughing. ‘The droll little units that call themselves “society?” I daresay they do appreciate it — they have got nothing else to think or talk about but “he” and “she” and “we” and “they.” And yet poor old Mortlands, who was here this afternoon, forgot all about this same wonderful title many times, and kept on calling me “Miss Vaughan.” Then he apologised, and said in extenuation, that to add a “ladyship” to my name was “to gild refined gold and paint the lily.” That quotation has often been used before under similar circumstances, but he gave it quite a new flavour of gallantry.’
‘The Mortlands family dates back to about the same period as ours,’ said Carlyon, musingly.
‘As ours? Say as yours, my dear lord!’ returned Delicia, gaily, ‘for I am sure I do not know where the Vaughans come from. I must go down to the Heralds’ College and see if I cannot persuade someone in authority there to pick me out an ancestor who did great deeds before the Carlyons ever existed! Ancestral glory is such a question with you now, Will, that I almost wish I were the daughter of a Chicago pork-packer.’
‘Why?’ asked Carlyon, a trifle gloomily.
‘Why, because I could at any rate get up a past “Pilgrim Father” if necessary. A present-day reputation is evidently not sufficient for you.’
‘I think the old days were best,’ he said curtly.
‘Yes? When the men kept the women within four walls, as cows are kept in byres, and gave them just the amount of food they thought they deserved, and beat them if they were rebellious? Well, perhaps those times were pleasant, but I am afraid I should never have appreciated them. I prefer to see things advancing — as they are — and I like a civilisation which includes the education of women as well as of men.’
‘Things are advancing a great deal too quickly, in my opinion,’ said Carlyon, languidly, pouring out a glass of the choice claret beside him. ‘I should be inclined to vote for a little less rapid progress, in regard to women.’
‘Yet only the other day you were saying what a shame it was that women could not win full academic honours like men; and you even said that they ought to be given titles, in reward for their services to Science, Art and Literature,’ said Delicia. ‘What has made you change your opinion?’
He did not look up at her, but absently played with the crumbs on the table-cloth.
‘Well, I am not sure that it is the correct thing for women to appear very prominently in public,’ he said.
A momentary contraction of Delicia’s fine brows showed that a touch of impatience ruffled her humour. But she restrained herself, and said with perfect composure, —
‘I am afraid I don’t quite follow your meaning, unless, perhaps, your words apply to the new dancer, La Marina?’
He gave a violent start, and with a sudden movement of his hand upset his wine glass. Delicia watched the red wine staining the satiny whiteness of the damask table-cloth without any exclamation or sign of annoyance. Her heart was beating fast, because through her drooping lashes she saw her husband’s face, and read there an expression that was strange and new to her.
‘Oh, I know what has happened,’ he said fiercely, and with almost an oath, as he strove to wipe off the drops of Chateau Lafite that soiled his cuff as well as the table-cloth. ‘That woman Lefroy has been here telling tales and making mischief! I saw her, with her crew of social rowdies, at the Savoy the other night....’
‘And she saw you!’ interpolated Delicia, smiling.
‘Well, what if she did?’ he snapped out irritably. ‘I was introduced to La Marina by Prince Golitzberg — you know that German fellow — and he asked me to take her off his hands. He had promised her a supper at the Savoy, and at the last moment he was sent for to go to his wife, who was seized with sudden illness. I could not refuse to oblige him; he’s a decent sort of chap. Then, of course, as luck would have it, in comes that spoil-sport of a Lefroy and makes all this rumpus!’
‘My dear Will!’ expostulated Delicia, in gentle amazement, ‘what are you talking about? Where is the rumpus? What has Mrs Lefroy done? She simply mentioned to me to-day that she had seen you at the Savoy with this Marina, and there the matter ended, and, as far as I am concerned, there it will for ever end.’
‘That is all nonsense!’ said Carlyon, still wiping his cuff. ‘You know you are put out, or you wouldn’t look at me in the way you do!’
Delicia laughed.
‘What way am I looking?’ she demanded merrily. ‘Pray, my dear boy, don’t be so conceited as to imagine I mind your taking the Marina, or any amount of Marinas, to supper at the Savoy, if that kind of thing amuses you! Surely you don’t suppose that I bring myself into comparison with “ladies” of Marina’s class, or that I could be jealous of such persons? I am afraid you do not know me yet, Will, though we have spent such happy years together! You have neither fathomed the depth of my love, nor taken the measure of my pride! Besides, — I trust you!’ She paused. Then rising from the table, she handed him the little silver box containing his cigars. ‘Smoke off your petulance, dear boy!’ she said, ‘and join me upstairs when you are ready. We go to the Premier’s reception to-night, remember.’
Her hand rested for a moment on his shoulder with a caressing touch; anon, humming a little tune under her breath, and followed by Spartan, who never let her go out of his sight for a moment if he could help it, she left the room. Ascending the staircase, she stopped on the threshold of her study and looked in with a vague air, as though the place had suddenly grown unfamiliar. There, immediately facing her, smiled the pictured lineaments of Shakespeare, that immortal friend of man; her favourite books greeted her with all the silent yet persuasive eloquence of their well-known and deeply-honoured titles; the electric lights, fitted up to represent small stars in the ceiling, were not turned on, and only the young moon peered glimmeringly through the lattice window, shedding a pale lustre on the marble features of the ‘Antinous.’ Standing quite still, she gazed at all these well-known objects of her daily surroundings with a curious sense of strangeness, Spartan staring up wonderingly at her the while.
‘What is it that is wrong with me?’ she mused. ‘Why do I feel as if I were suddenly thrust out of my usual peace, and made to take a part in the common and mean disputes of petty-minded men and women?’
She waited another minute, then apparently conquering whatever emotion was at work within her, she pressed the ivory handle which diffused light on all visible things, and entered the room with a quiet step and a half-penitent look, as of regret for having given offence to some invisible spirit-monitor.
‘Oh, you dear, dear friends!’ she said, approaching the bookshelves, and softly apostrophising the volumes ranged there as if they were sentient personages, ‘I am afraid I do not consult you half enough! You are always with me, ready to give me the soundest advice on any subject under the sun; advice founded on sage experience, too! Tell me something now, out of your stores of wisdom, to stop this foolish little aching at my heart — this irritating, selfish, suspicious trouble which is quite unworthy of me, as it is unworthy of anyone who has had the high privilege of learning great lessons from such teachers as you are! It is not as if I were a woman whose sole ideas of life are centred on dress and domesticity, or one of those
unhappy, self-tormenting creatures who cannot exist without admiration and flattery; I am, I think and hope, differently constituted, and mean to try for great things, even if I never succeed in attaining them. But in trying for greatness, one must not descend to littleness — save me from this danger, my dear old-world comrades, if you can, for to-night I am totally unlike myself. There are thoughts in my brain that might have excited Xantippe, but which should never trouble Delicia, if to herself Delicia prove but true!’
And she raised her eyes, half smiling, to the meditative countenance of Shakespeare. ‘Excellent and “divine Williams,” you must excuse me for fitting your patriotic line on England to my unworthy needs; but why would you make yourself so eminently quotable?’ She paused, then took up a book lying on her desk. ‘Here is an excellent doctor for a sick, petulant child such as I am — Marcus Aurelius. What will you say to me, wise pagan? Let me see,’ and opening a page at random, her eyes fell on the words, ‘Do not suppose you are hurt, and your complaint ceases. Cease your complaint and you are not hurt.’
She laughed, and her face began to light up with all its usual animation.
‘Excellent Emperor! What a wholesome thrashing you give me! Anything more?’ And she turned over a few pages, and came upon one of the imperial moralist’s most coolly-dictatorial assertions. ‘What an easy matter it is to stem the current of your imagination, to discharge a troublesome or improper thought, and at once return to a state of calm!’
‘I don’t know about that, Marcus,’ she said. ‘It is not exactly an “easy” matter to stem the current of imagination, but certainly it’s worth trying;’ and she read on, ‘To-day I rushed clear out of misfortune, or rather, I threw misfortune from me; for, to speak the truth, it was not outside, and never came any nearer than my own fancy.’
She closed the book smilingly — the beautiful equanimity of her disposition was completely restored. She left her pretty writing den, bidding Spartan remain there on guard — a mandate he was accustomed to, and which he obeyed instantly, though with a deep sigh, his mistress’s ‘evenings out’ being the chief trouble of his otherwise enviable existence. Delicia, meantime, went to dress for the Premier’s reception, and soon slipped into the robe she had had designed for herself by a famous firm of Indian embroiderers; — a garment of softest white satin, adorned with gold and silver thread, and pearls thickly intertwined, so as to present the appearance of a mass of finely-wrought jewels. A single star of diamonds glittered in her hair, and she carried a fan of natural lilies, tied with white ribbon. Thus attired, she joined her husband, who stood ready and waiting for her in the drawing-room. He glanced up at her somewhat shamefacedly.
‘You look your very best this evening, Delicia,’ he said.
She made him a sweeping curtsey, and smiled.
‘My lord, your favouring praise doth overwhelm me!’ she answered. ‘Is it not meet and right that I should so appear as to be deemed worthy of the house of Carlyon!
He put his arm round her waist and drew her to him. It was curious, he thought, how fresh her beauty seemed! And how the men in his ‘set’ would have burst into a loud guffaw of coarse laughter if any of them had thought that such was his opinion of his wife’s charm — his own wife, to whom he had been fast wedded for over three years! According to the rules of ‘modern’ morality, one ought in three years to have had enough of one’s lawful wife, and find a suitable ‘soul’ wherewith to claim ‘affinity.’
‘Delicia,’ he said, playing idly with the lilies of her fan, ‘I am sorry you were vexed about the Marina woman—’
She interrupted him by laying her little white-gloved fingers on his lips.
‘Vexed? Oh, no, Will, not vexed. Why should I be? Pray don’t let us talk about it any more; I have almost forgotten the incident. Come! It’s time we started!’
And in response to the oddly penitent, half-sullen manner of the ‘naughty boy’ he chose to assume, she kissed him. Whereupon he tried that one special method of his, which had given him the victory in his wooing of her, the Passionate Outbreak; and murmuring in his rich voice that she was always the ‘one woman in the world,’ the ‘angel of his life,’ and altogether the very crown and summit of sweet perfection, he folded her in his arms with all a lover’s fervour. And she, clinging to him, forgot her doubts and fears, forgot the austere observations of Marcus Aurelius, forgot the triumphs of her own intellectual career, forgot everything, in fact, but that she was the blindly-adoring devotee of a six-foot Guardsman, whom she had herself set up as a ‘god’ on the throne of the Ideal, and whom she worshipped through such a roseate cloud of sweet self-abnegation that she was unable to perceive how poor a fetish her idol was after all — made of nothing but the very commonest clay!
CHAPTER III
The smoking-room of the ‘Bohemian’ was full of a motley collection of men of the literary vagabond type — reporters, paragraphists, writers of penny dreadfuls, reeled off tape-wise from the thin spools of smoke-dried masculine brains; stray actors, playwrights anxious to translate the work of some famous foreigner and so get fastened on to his superior coat-tails, ‘adapters’ desirous of dramatising some celebrated novel and pocketing all the profits, anxious ‘proposers’ of new magazines looking about for ‘funds’ to back them up, and among all these an extremely casual sprinkling of the brilliant and successful workers in art and literature, who were either honorary members, or who had allowed their names to stand on the committee in order to give ‘prestige’ to a collection which would otherwise be termed the ‘rag-tag and bob-tail’ of literature. The opinions of the ‘Bohemian,’ — the airily idiotic theories with which the members disported themselves, and furnished food for laughter to the profane — were occasionally quoted in the newspapers, which of course gave the club a certain amount of importance in its own eyes, if in nobody else’s. And the committee put on what is called a considerable amount of ‘side’; now and then affecting to honour some half-and-half celebrity by asking him to a Five-Shilling dinner, and dubbing him the ‘guest of the evening,’ he meantime gloomily taking note of the half-cold, badly-cooked poorness of the meal, and debating within himself whether it would be possible to get away in time to have a chop ‘from the grill’ somewhere on his way home. The ‘Bohemian’ had been a long time getting started, owing to the manner in which the gentlemen who were ‘in’ persistently black-balled every new aspirant for the honours of membership. The cause of this arose from the chronic state of nervous jealousy in which the ‘Bohemians’ lived. To a certain extent, and as far as their personal animosities would permit, they were a ‘Mutual Admiration Society,’ and dreaded the intrusion of any stranger who might set himself to discover ‘their tricks and their manners.’ They had a lawyer of their own, whose business it was to arrange the disputes of the club, should occasion require his services, and they also had a doctor, a humorous and very clever little man, who was fond of strolling about the premises in the evening, and taking notes for the writing of a medical treatise to be entitled ‘Literary Dyspepsia, and the Passion of Envy considered in its Action on the Spleen and Other Vital Organs,’ a book which he justly considered would excite a great deal of interest among his professional compeers. But in spite of the imposing Committee of Names, the lawyer and the doctor, the ‘Bohemian’ did not pay. It struggled on, hampered with debts and difficulties, like most of its members. It gave smoking-concerts occasionally, for which it charged extra, and twice a year it admitted ladies to its dinners, during which banquets speeches were made distinctly proving to the fair sex that they had no business at all to be present. Still, with every advantage that a running fire of satirical comment could give it in the way of notoriety, the ‘Bohemian’ was not a prosperous concern; and no Yankee Bullion-Bag seemed inclined to take it up or invest in the chances of its future. A more sallow, sour, discontented set of men than were congregated in the smoking-room on the particular evening now in question could hardly be found anywhere between London and the Antipodes, and only the l
ittle doctor, leaning back in a lounge-chair with his neatly-shaped little legs easily crossed, and a smile on his face, seemed to enjoy his position as an impartial spectator of the scene. His smile, however, was one of purely professional satisfaction; he was making studies of a ‘subject’ in the person of a long-haired ‘poet,’ who wrote his own reviews. This son of the Muses was an untidy, dirty-looking man, and his abundant locks irresistibly reminded one of a black goat-skin door-mat, worn in places where reckless visitors had wiped their muddy boots thereon. No doubt this poet washed occasionally, but his skin was somewhat of the peculiar composition complained of by Lady Macbeth— ‘All the perfumes of Arabia’ would neither cleanse nor ‘sweeten’ it.
‘Jaundice,’ murmured the little doctor, pleasantly; ‘I’ll give him a year, and he’ll be down with its worst form. Too much smoke, too much whisky, combined mentally with conceit, spite, and the habitual concentration of the imagination on self; and no gaiety, wit or kindness to temper the mixture. All bad for the health — as bad as bad can be! But, God bless my soul, what does it matter? He’d never be missed!’
And he rubbed his hands jubilantly, smiling still.
Meanwhile the rhymester thus doomed was seated at a distant table and writing of himself thus, —
‘If Shelley was a poet, if Byron was a poet, if we own Shakespeare as a king of bards and dramatists, then Mr Aubrey Grovelyn is a poet also, eminently fitted to be the comrade of these immortals. Inspired thought, beauty of diction, ease and splendour of rhythm distinguish Aubrey Grovelyn’s muse as they distinguish Shakespeare’s utterances; and in bestowing upon this gifted singer the praise that is justly due to him, we feel we are rendering a service to England in being among the first to point out the glorious promise and value of a genius who is destined to outsoar all his contemporaries in far-reaching originality and grandeur of design.’
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 399