by Ouida
“It’s rather late to think about that; I sent her her breakfast before you came in.”
“Dear me! how very fatherly of you!”
The counsellor laughed. “I feel like her father, I assure you.”
Lady Dolly coloured, and lit a cigarette. She felt that she would not digest her breakfast. Henceforth there would be two bills to pay — the interest of them at any rate — at all the great tailors’ and milliners’ houses in Paris and London; she had an uneasy sense that to whirl in and out the mazes of the cotillons, or smoke your cigarette on the smooth lawns of shooting-clubs, vis-à-vis with your own daughter, was a position, in the main, rather ridiculous; and she had still an uneasier conviction that the girl in the brown holland would not be taught in a moment to comprehend the necessity for the existence of Jack — and the rest.
“That horrid old duchess!” she murmured, sinking to sleep with the last atom of her cigarette crumbling itself away on the open page of a French novel. For it was the duchess who had sent her Vere.
CHAPTER II.
Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, who was Lady Dolly to everybody, down to the very boys that ran after her carriage in the streets, was the seventh daughter of a very poor peer, the Earl of Caterham, who was a clever politician, but always in a chronic state of financial embarrassment. Lady Dolly had made a very silly love-match with her own cousin, Vere Herbert, a younger son of her uncle the Duke of Mull and Cantire, when she was only seventeen, and he had just left Oxford and entered the Church. But Vere Herbert had only lived long enough for her to begin to get very tired of his country parsonage in the wilds of the Devonshire moors, and to be left before she was twenty with a miserable pittance for her portion, and a little daughter twelve months old to plague her farther. Lady Dolly cried terribly for a fortnight, and thought she cried for love, when she only cried for worry. In another fortnight or so she had ceased to cry, had found out that crape brightened her pretty tea-rose skin, had discarded her baby to the care of her aunt and mother-in-law, the old and austere Duchess of Mull, and had gone for her health with her own gay little mother, the Countess of Caterham, to the south of France.
In the south of France Lady Dolly forgot that she had ever cried at all; and in a year’s time from the loss of Vere Herbert had married herself again to a Mr. Vanderdecken, an Englishman of Dutch extraction, a rich man, of no remarkable lineage, a financier, a contractor, a politician, a very restless creature, always rushing about alone, and never asking any questions — which suited her. On the other hand it suited him to ally himself with a score of great families, and obtain a lovely and high-born wife; it was one of those marriages which everybody calls so sensible, so suitable, so very nice! Quite unlike the marriage with poor Vere Herbert, which everybody had screamed at, as they had not made up five hundred a year in income, or forty-five years in age, between them.
Lady Dolly and Mr. Vanderdecken did not perhaps find it so perfectly well assorted when they had had a little of it; she thought him stingy, he thought her frivolous, but they did not tell anybody else so, and so everybody always said that the marriage was very nice. They were always seen in the Bois and the Park together, and always kept house together three months every spring in London; they went to country houses together, and certainly dined out together at least a dozen times every season: nothing could be nicer, Lady Dolly took care of that.
She thought him a great bore, a great screw; she never had enough money by half, and he was sometimes very nasty about cheques. But he was not troublesome about anything else, and was generally head over ears in some wonderful loan, or contract, or subsidy, which entailed distant journeys, and absorbed him entirely; so that, on the whole, she was content and enjoyed herself.
This morning, however, she had gone down to the shore not indeed fully anticipating such a blow as had fallen upon her, but ruffled, disgusted, and nervous, conscious that her daughter was travelling towards her, and furious with the person she termed a “horrid old cat.”
The old cat was the now dowager Duchess of Mull, who for fifteen years had kept safe in Northumbria the daughter of poor Vere, and now had hurled her like a cannon-ball at Lady Dolly’s head in this hideous, abominable, unforeseen manner, straight on the sands of Trouville, in sight of that snake in angel’s guise, the Princesse Hélène Olgarouski!
Lady Dolly, who never would allow that she gave up her maternal rights, though she would never be bored with maternal responsibilities, had quarrelled for the nine-hundredth time (by post) with the Duchess of Mull; quarrelled desperately, impudently, irrevocably, quarrelled once too often; and the result of the quarrel had been the instant despatch of her daughter to Trouville, with the duchess’s declaration that she could struggle for the soul of her poor son’s child no longer, and that come what would, she consigned Vere to her mother then and for ever more.
“The horrid woman will be howling for the child again in a week’s time,” thought Lady Dolly, “but she has done it to spite me, and I’ll keep the child to spite her. That’s only fair.”
The duchess had taken her at her word, that was all; but then, indeed, there are few things more spiteful that one can do to anybody than to take them at their word. Lady Dolly had been perplexed, irritated, and very angry with herself for having written all that rubbish about suffering from the unnatural deprivation of her only child’s society; rubbish which had brought this stroke of retribution on her head.
She had pulled her blonde perruque all awry in her vexation; she did not want that perruque at all, for her own hair was thick and pretty, but she covered it up and wore the perruque because it was the fashion to do so.
Lady Dolly had always been, and was very pretty: she had lovely large eyes, and the tiniest mouth, and a complexion which did not want all the pains she bestowed on it; when she had not the perruque on, she had dark silky hair all tumbled about over her eyebrows in a disarray that cost her maid two hours to compose; and her eyebrows themselves were drawn beautifully in two fine, dark, slender lines by a pencil that supplied the one defect of Nature. When she was seventeen, at the rectory, amongst the rosebuds on the lawn, she had been a rosebud herself; now she was a Dresden statuette; the statuette was the more finished and brilliant beauty of the two, and never seemed the worse for wear. This is the advantage of artificial over natural loveliness; the latter will alter with health or feeling, the former never; it is always the same, unless you come in on it at its toilette, or see it when it is very ill.
Lady Dolly this morning woke up prematurely from her sleep and fancied she was in the old parsonage gardens on the lawn, amongst the roses in Devonshire, with poor Vere’s pale handsome face looking down so tenderly on hers. She felt a mist before her eyes, a tightness at her throat; a vague and worried pain all over her. “It is the prawns!” she said to herself, “I will never smoke after prawns again.”
She was all alone; the counsellor had gone to his schooner, other counsellors were at their hotels, it was an hour when everything except Englishmen and dogs were indoors. She rose, shook her muslin breakfast-wrapper about her impatiently, and went to see her daughter.
“He used to be so fond of me, poor fellow!” she thought. Such a pure fond passion then amongst the roses by the sea. It had all been very silly, and he used to bore her dreadfully with Keble, and his namesake, George of holy memory, and that old proser Thomas à Kempis; but still it had been a different thing to ah these other loves. He lay in his grave there by the Atlantic amongst the Devon roses, and she had had no memory of him for many a year, and when he had been alive, she had thought the church and the old women, and the saints, and the flannel, and the choral services, and the matins — and vesper — nonsense, all so tiresome; but still he had loved her. Of course they all adored her now, heaps of them — but his love had been a different thing to theirs. And somehow Lady Dolly felt a tinge and twinge of shame.
“Poor Vere,” she murmured to herself tenderly; and so went to see his daughter, who had been called after him by tha
t absurd old woman, the Duchess of Mull, with whom Lady Dolly in her dual relation of niece and daughter-in-law had always waged a fierce undying war: a war in which she had now got the worst of it.
“May I come in, dear?” she said at the bed-chamber door. She felt almost nervous. It was very absurd, but why would the girl have her dead father’s eyes?
The girl opened the door and stood silent.
“A beautiful creature. They are quite right,” thought Lady Dolly, now that her brain was no longer filled with the dreadful rumpled brown holland, and the smiling face of Princess Hélène. The girl was in a white wrapper like her own, only without any lace, and any of the ribbons that adorned Lady Dolly at ah points, as tassels a Roman horse at Carnival. Lady Dolly was too lovely herself, and also far too contented with herself to feel any jealousy; but she looked at her daughter critically, as she would have looked at a young untried actress on the boards of the Odéon. “Quite another style to me, that is fortunate,” she thought as she looked. “Like Vere — very — quite extraordinarily like Vere — only handsomer still.”
Then she kissed her daughter very prettily on both cheeks, and with effusion embraced her, much as she embraced Princess Hélène or anybody else that she hated.
“You took me by surprise to-day, love,” she said with a little accent of apology, “and you know I do so detest scenes. Pray try and remember that.”
“Scenes?” said Vere. “Please what are they?”
“Scenes?” said Lady Dolly, kissing her once more, and a little puzzled as everybody is, who is suddenly asked to define a familiar word. “Scenes? Well, dear me, scenes are — scenes. Anything, you know, that makes a fuss, that looks silly, that sets people laughing; don’t you understand? Anything done before people, you know: it is vulgar.”
“I think I understand,” said Vere Herbert. She was a very lovely girl, and despite her height still looked a child. Her small head was perfectly poised on a slender neck, and her face, quite colourless, with a complexion like the leaf of a white rose, had perfect features, straight, delicate, and noble; her fair hair was cut square over her brows, and loosely knotted behind; she had a beautiful serious mouth, not so small as her mothers, and serene eyes, grey as night, contemplative, yet wistful.
She was calm and still. She had cried as if her heart would break, but she would have died rather than let her mother guess it. She had been what the French call refoulée sur elle-même; and the process is chilling.
“Have you all you want?” said Lady Dolly, casting a hasty glance round the room. “You know I didn’t expect you, dear; not in the least.”
“Surely my grandmother wrote?”
“Your grandmother telegraphed that you had started; just like her! Of course I wished to have you here, and meant to do so, but not all in a moment.”
“The horrid old woman will be howling for the child back again in three weeks’ time,” thought Lady Dolly once more. “But she has done it to spite me: the old cat!”
“Are you sorry to come to me, love?” she said sweetly meanwhile, drawing Vere down beside her on a couch.
“I was very glad,” answered Vere.
Lady Dolly discreetly omitted to notice the past tense. “Ah, no doubt, very dear of you! It is three years since I saw you; for those few days at Bulmer hardly count. Bulmer is terribly dull, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is dull; I was not so. If grandmamma had not been so often—”
“Cross as two sticks, you mean,” laughed Lady Dolly. “Oh, I know her, my dear: the most disagreeable person that ever lived. The dear old duke was so nice and so handsome; but you hardly remember him, of course. Your grandmamma is a cat, dear — a cat, positively a cat! We will not talk about her. And how she has dressed you! It is quite wicked to dress a girl like that, it does her taste so much harm. You are very handsome, Vere.”
“Yes? I am like my father they say.”
“Very.”
Lady Dolly felt the mist over her eyes again, and this time knew it was not the prawns. She saw the sunny lawn in Devon, and the roses, and the little large-eyed child at her breast. Heavens! what a long way away all that time seemed.
She gazed intently at Vere with a musing pathetic tenderness that moved the girl, and made her tremble and glow, because at last this lovely mother of hers seemed to feel. Lady Dolly’s gaze grew graver, more and more introspective.
“She is thinking of the past and of my father,” thought the girl tenderly, and her young heart swelled with reverent sympathy. She did not dare to break her mother’s silence.
“Vere!” said Lady Dolly dreamily, at length, “I am trying to think what one can do to get you decent clothes. My maid must run up something for you to wear by to-morrow. It is a pity to keep you shut up all this beautiful weather, and a little life will do you good after that prison at Bulmer. I am sure those three days I was last there I thought I should have yawned till I broke my neck, I did indeed, dear. She would hardly let me have breakfast in my own room, and she would dine at six! — six! But she was never like anybody else; when even the duke was alive she was the most obstinate, humdrum, nasty old scratch-cat in the county. Such ideas too! She was a sort of Wesley in petticoats, and, by the way, her gowns were never long enough for her. But I was saying, dear, I will have Adrienne run up something for you directly. She is clever. I never let a maid make a dress. It is absurd. You might as well want Rubinstein to make the violin he plays on. If she is inferior, she will make you look dowdy. If she is a really good maid she will not make, she will arrange, what your tailor has made, and perfect it — nothing more. But still, for you, Adrienne will go out of her way for once. She shall combine a few little things, and she can get a girl to sew them for her. Something to go out in they really must manage for to-morrow. You shall have brown holland if you are so fond of it, dear, but you shall see what brown holland can look like with Adrienne.”
Vere sat silent.
“By the bye,” said her mother vivaciously, “didn’t you bring a maid? Positively, not a maid?”
“Grandmamma sent Keziah: she has always done very well for me.”
“Keziah!” echoed Lady Dolly with a shudder. “How exactly it is like your grandmother to give you a woman called Keziah! That horrible Fraulein one might dismiss too, don’t you think? You are old enough to do without her, and you shall have a nice French maid; Adrienne will soon find one.”
The girl’s eyes dilated with fear.
“Oh! pray do not send away the Fraulein! We are now in the conic sections.”
“The what?” said Lady Dolly.
“I mean I could not go on in science or mathematics without her, and besides, she is so good.”
“Mathematics! science! why, what can you want to make yourself hateful for, like a Girton College guy?”
“I want to know things; pray do not send away the Fraulein.”
Lady Dolly, who was at heart very good-natured when her own comfort was not too much interfered with, patted her cheek and laughed.
“What should you want to know? — know how to dress, how to curtsey, how to look your best; that is all you want to know. Believe me, men will ask nothing more of you. As for your hideous Schroder, I think her the most odious person in existence, except your grandmother. But if her blue spectacles comfort you, keep her at present. Of course you will want somebody to be with you a good deal: I can’t be; and I suppose you’ll have to stay with me now. You may be seen here a little, and wherever I go in autumn; then you can come out in Paris in the winter, and be presented next spring. I shall do it to spite your grandmother, who has behaved disgracefully to me — disgracefully. I believe she’d be capable of coming up to London to present you herself, though she’s never set foot there for fifteen years!”
Vere was silent.
“What do you like best?” said her mother suddenly. Something in the girl worried her: she could not have said what it was.
Vere lifted her great eyes dreamily.
“Greek,�
�� she answered.
“Greek! a horse? a pony? a dog?”
“A language,” said Vere.
“Of course Greek is a language; I know that,” said her mother irritably. “But of course I thought you meant something natural, sensible; some pet of some kind. And what do you like best after that, pray?”
“Music — Greek is like music.”
“Oh dear me!” sighed Lady Dolly.
“I can ride; I am fond of riding,” added Vere; “and I can shoot, and row, and sail, and steer a boat. The keepers taught me.”
“Well, that sort of thing goes down rather, now that they walk with the guns, though I’m quite sure men wish them anywhere all the while,” said Lady Dolly, somewhat vaguely. “Only you must be masculine with it, and slangy, and you don’t seem to me to be that in the least. Do you know, Vere — it is a horrible thing to say — but I am dreadfully afraid you will be just the old-fashioned, prudish, open-air, touch-me-not Englishwoman! I am indeed. Now you know that won’t answer anywhere, nowadays.”
“Answer — what?”
“Don’t take my words up like that, it is rude. I mean, you know, that kind of style is gone out altogether, pleases nobody; men hate it. The only women that please nowadays are Russians and Americans. Why? Because in their totally different ways they neither of them care one fig what they do if only it please them to do it. They are all chic you know. Now you haven’t a bit of chic; you look like a creature out of Burne-Jones’s things, don’t you know, only more — more — religious-looking. You really look as if you were studying your Bible every minute; it is most extraordinary!”
“Her father would read me Keble and Kemp is before she was born,” thought Lady Dolly angrily, her wrath rising against the dead man for the psychological inconsistencies in her daughter; a daughter she would have been a million times better without at any time.
“Well, then, my love,” she said suddenly; “you shall ride and you shall swim; that will certainly help you better than your Greek and your conic sessions, whatever they may be, they sound like something about magistrates, perhaps they have taught you law as well?”