Эдвард Бенсон
Scarlet and Hyssop: A Novel

"But there are lots of stories," began Mildred.

"Thousands. But not of that damaging kind. If you had said she was having an intrigue, say, with the Emperor of Russia, it would have hurt nobody, not even the Emperor. Never mind, dear, the thing is done. We must consider how we can make the best of it. A scandal is always a dangerous thing to touch. If one denies it afterwards, if even the inventor, who believes it to be true – how ridiculous, too, of you, dear Mildred! – denies it, there will always be people who think that the denial merely confirms it. In this case it is peculiarly complicated. The great thing is that the whole invention was so silly from the start. I should have thought, dear Mildred, that you had a better imagination. But you have not. It is not your fault; you cannot help it. What shall we do, do you think?"

This old woman was not so impotent as Mildred had hoped. She had been accustomed to consider herself fairly wide awake, but it appeared that her waking moments were somnolence personified to Lady Ardingly.

"I don't know," she said feebly.

"Then, I will tell you," said Lady Ardingly. "Start a scandal – you are so good at it – about yourself and Jim Spencer. Nothing circumstantial – only let it be in the air. Let people say things; there is nothing easier. Then it will appear also that you have broken with Jack. That, I tell you, will not injure him. A married man is open to damaging scandals in two ways: one through himself, one through his wife. And in Jack's case, my dear, both these doors are flung wide, and Lady Brereton enters through each, trumpeting like – like an elephant."

Lady Ardingly nodded her head at Mildred, with the air of a nurse scolding a refractory child.

"Now, do not look so disconsolate, my dear," she went on, observing Mildred's face falling as a barometer falls before a cyclone, "but just bestir yourself. You should really in future consult somebody before you embark on these efforts. You have dug a bottomless well, so I may say, at the foot of the ladder by which your friend Jack was preparing to mount. There is room – just room – to get him on to it still. But there is only one way of doing it – that is, by stopping somehow or another that very silly story you made up about his wife, and by taking very great care how you are talked about in connection with him by the wrong people – just now, perhaps, by anybody. You can do both these things by letting it be supposed that you are intime with Mr. Spencer. Let us talk of something else."

Lady Ardingly rose with the air of closing the subject altogether. She knew exactly when to stop rubbing a thing in, the object of that salutary process being to make the place smart sufficiently, but not unbearably. Mildred, she considered, was smarting enough.

"And about your tall daughter?" she said. "How does that go?"

"She is lovable, and he loves her; but he is not lovable, and she does not love him," quoted Mildred, restraining quite admirably her impulse to sulk or lose her temper.

"Ah! you must give her time. If he is really in love with her, he will be very patient. And, since you love her," she added, without any change of voice, "you will be patient with her, too."

Mildred got up.

"I must go," she said. "Thank you very much, Lady Ardingly. I have made a mess of things."

"Yes, dear," said the other, "and you must wipe it up. Must you be going? Some people are coming in for Bridge almost immediately. Please dine here, if you can, to-day week. I will ask Mr. Spencer, and I will not ask Jack. That is the day before we all go down to Ascot. I hope you have backed Ardingly's horse for the Eclipse Stakes. Good-bye, dear."

Mildred went out, a limp figure, leaving Lady Ardingly looking like a restored sphinx on the hearth-rug. Then she spoke to herself very gently and slowly.

"I cannot bear cooks," she said, "and other people like them so much; but I think I deserve a great many aces at Bridge."

Jack and Mildred went their respective ways full of thoughts, which up to a certain point were very similar. Prominent, at any rate, in the mind of each was that, though they knew each other very well, they would not mention that they had had an interview with Lady Ardingly. Jack here was in the superior position, since he knew that Mildred had succeeded him in audience, and felt sure that, whether Mildred told him so or not, he would find some impress of what had taken place in the next intimate conversation they had together. With regard to his reflection on his own interview, he saw the admirable justice of the greater part of Lady Ardingly's views; he did not, however, see the fitness of telling Marie anything whatever. This appeared to him a heroic remedy for a contingency too remote to reckon with. He knew her, he told himself, well enough to know that he did not know her at all, and she was quite capable, as far as he was aware, of making what Lady Ardingly had called "a row of monstrous proportions." This, as she had herself said just now, at this juncture in his affairs would be fatal to him. She might even petition for a divorce, in which case, as Lady Ardingly said, "he went." There remained, as she had suggested, the other alternative of giving up Mildred, of terminating the whole affair. He had told Lady Ardingly he could not. At any rate, she was an invaluable friend; no false notions of sentiment or altruism ever found their way into her conversation. She advised from a flintily-logical, hard, worldly standpoint.

At this point his reflections travelled off into ways utterly unknown to her, and till lately unknown to himself; and even now he only groped his path among them in a dim twilight. For he had said "I can't," not from certainty of diagnosis, but from mere incredulity at his own symptoms. His long intrigue with Mildred he had brought himself to believe was necessary to him; he could not clearly picture any other way of life. No less necessary, so he had always thought, was his aloofness from Marie. But lately – dating, in point of fact, from the time of that scene when he had told Marie what he had heard said at the "Deuce of Spades" – he had been conscious of a change in himself as indefinable, but as certain, as the first hint of dawn. Again, a pulse beat in him which had long been dormant – the pulse that had throbbed in his arteries when he was younger by more years than he cared to count, when women had been to him, not the vehicle, but the deity, of passion. He had thrown his earlier convictions in the mud, and in the conduct of his life had trampled them under-foot; and now, at the end, like the trodden seeds of wheat, they were already in ear. Marie's frank and honest contempt for him had begun this process, for it had first jarred and disturbed, then woke to activity some relaxed fibre which had long been overlaid by grosser tissue, but was alive for all that.

Then, feebly at first, the knowledge of the "might-have-been" dawned on him – that drug always bitter, and only sometimes salutary, producing in some contrition and amendment, in others only recklessness. At present it was bitter; but the bitterness was tonic. He could not yet tell whether the "might-have-been" had passed into the "cannot-be." That depended partly on himself, no doubt, but partly on her. And of her, out of long familiarity, he knew nothing. Then, simultaneously with remorse, or, at any rate, with his appreciation of her scorn for him, came in another factor, his reawakened knowledge of her beauty – a low motive, it may be, on which to base faithfulness or recall the unfaithful, but, as long as men are men, a very real one. Yet for years he had sought another woman, dimming the light of complete desire with the damp of physical satiety. This other had ministered to the demands of the flesh, she had also fulfilled that which lay immediately behind, for she had supplied him always with a ready response to his more carnal ambitions: she had flattered his own self-flattery. He had posed, as it were, before a quantity of mirrors, sometimes convex, sometimes concave, which had showed him himself now taller, now shorter, than he was. But she had never shown him himself, still less any ideal of what he might be. Then, still touching the same spot, had come Lady Ardingly's gentle classification of Mildred as a cook, made, not with the air of discovery, but merely as a passing allusion to what both knew. A cook, that was all.

Mildred's reflections were far simpler to follow, and far less disquieting. No doubt she had made a mistake about the scandal she had tried to start about Marie, and it was a comfort to think that Lady Ardingly's remarks about the silliness of it being its own doom were true. Meantime it would be amusing to "run" Jim Spencer for a while, and she felt sure that, even if she could not do it, she could easily convey the impression that she was doing it. On the whole, she would not tell Jack she had seen Lady Ardingly (this was unnecessary, for he knew), and the rest of her meditation was composed of a sense of holding Jack's rein, whatever Lady Ardingly might say, and a superb determination to do her unselfish best for him. She was, as a matter of fact, hopelessly incapable of doing anything unselfish, but a benignant Providence having denied her the possibility of altruism, spared her also the humiliation of the knowledge of its absence.

It so happened that they met the next evening at an omnibus kind of party at Arthur Naseby's, a bachelor host. He was a man of strange and wayward tastes, and you were liable to meet a Sioux Indian in feathers there one week, and a missionary who had crossed Africa and been eaten, so he would explain, by cannibal tribes, the next. In his way he was an admirable host, and, before introducing any one of his guests to another, hissed into his ear a rapid précis of the chief events of the other's life. These were sometimes wildly enigmatical, as when he murmured: "Frightful scandal just five years ago. Her uncle found dead in the Underground – probably blackmail. Cut for years afterwards. Don't allude to first-class carriages. Daughter of old Toby Fairbank – mother a Jewess." But, as a rule, his information was a help to the newly introduced, and he always pronounced their names loudly and distinctly, instead of murmuring inaudibly. To-night the party centred round a gifted French actress, who recited several poems in a most melodious voice and with a childlike air which was quite killing to those who knew what she was talking about. Later on there was Bridge, owing to the repeated demands of Lady Ardingly, and Jack and Mildred having cut out, it was quite natural that they should have a talk together in a somewhat secluded window-seat.

"You are getting on, Jack," said she. "I should not be the least surprised if there was a boom in you, as Andrew would say. Dear Andrew! he always remembers my birthday, while I always strive to forget it. One has so many. But he gave me these pearls. Are they not pretty? Yes, Jack, you are booming. You are in the air!"

"That is always rather a nuisance," remarked Jack. "One can't help wanting to assure people that a close inspection will not repay them."

"I don't think you need mind much. People are disposed to take a favourable view of you. You must manage to keep it up. The time of pigs and shorthorns is here," she said with a sigh. "Look: there is Silly Billy talking to Marie! She appears completely unconscious of his presence."

"She probably is, for I don't think she ever poses."

"There is faint praise in your voice," said Mildred.

"Undesignedly. At least, I had no intention of doing the other thing. By the way, I disquieted myself in vain over the Silly Billy episode, I think. It has not caught on."

"Nobody talked about anything else for three days," said Mildred, with a mother's protective instinct for her offspring. "You didn't suppose they would talk to you about it! But I am magnanimous enough to be glad it has dropped, Jack. It is very important – particularly important, I think – that you should have no joint in your harness just now. You will probably get into the Cabinet, upon which the searchlights will be turned on. I feel this strongly. I have meant to say it to you for – for some time."

He looked at her for a moment without replying.

"She caught it hot," he said to himself, not without satisfaction, for he saw vividly the truth of Lady Ardingly's estimate of her folly.

"I feel it, too," he said; and, though they agreed, a discordant note was definitely struck, and vibrated very audibly to the inward ear, with its own-widening harmonics.

"I am glad! As you implied to me not long ago, Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion. It was not very convincing to me then. But it is now. Also, Jack, it is best that Cæsar should not inspire spicy paragraphs in the gutter press."

Jack felt unreasonably irritated. The cook spoke here.

"Have you some scandal to tell me about myself," he asked, "also invented by you?"

"No. But why show temper?"

"Because you irritate me when you speak like that."

Mildred felt suddenly a little uncomfortable; she had a sense of uncertain grip.

"Really, Jack, you are very ungrateful!" she said. "I am taking all the trouble of sitting with you in the corner, and thinking of a hundred things for your good, which would never have occurred to you, and you merely tell me that I irritate you!"

"Well, what is it?" he replied.

She rose, really annoyed.

"I will leave you to find out for yourself," she said.

"You are sufficiently lucid. You have stated what you mean quite clearly. You will leave me. I have found out for myself. So shall we discuss it?"

She had made a false move, and knew it. There was some indefinable change about Jack, which she recognised though she could not analyze it. But the prospect of losing him, even temporarily, on his initiative, was quite another matter to doing it on her own.

"Yes, that is what I mean," she said, sitting down again. "I made a mess, or I might have made one, over that other affair, and I see now that it might have been very injurious to you, especially since Jim Spencer is standing as a Liberal for East Surrey. Did you know that, by the way?"

"Oh, yes. He talked to me about it. It was not wise of you."

"Well, luckily there is no harm done. The thing didn't catch on. But the point is to avoid other dangers. And for the present I am dangerous to you, Jack. People won't begin talking again unless they get fresh cause. Do not let us give them fresh cause."

"I quite agree with you," said he.

Mildred liked this less and less. She had imagined that he would want a lot of talking round and reasoning with, and it did not flatter her at all to find him so placidly in accord with her. Yet she had no tangible ground of complaint.

"So that is all right," she said. "Ah, here is Marie. Marie, whenever I see you in that pink dress, I think it is morning."

"It is nearly," said she. "Jack, I am going home. Are you stopping to play?"

He rose.

"No, I will come with you," he said.

Marie looked a little surprised.

"Stop by all means if you feel inclined," she said. "I will send the carriage back for you."

Mildred laughed.

"Mutual confidence of the very first water," she observed.

Again the cook motif sounded, setting his teeth on edge.

"No, I will come with you, Marie," he repeated.

CHAPTER XIII

Maud Brereton was lying in a hammock underneath a big chestnut-tree in the garden of the house at Windsor. She had been here a fortnight alone, having been sent from London in disgrace by her mother after her refusal, in consequence of her interview with Marie Alston, to accept the riches and devotion of Anthony Maxwell. This fortnight she had spent in sublime inaction, surrounded as she was by all those things which to her made life lovable. Her dogs were here, her pony was here, the meadows were tall with hay, the river brimming, and the garden-beds presented every day some new miracle of unfolding colour. Each morning she had got up early and ridden in the park, while the day was still cool and dewy; she had read, not much; she had played the piano diligently; she had been the centre of an adoring crowd of dogs and gardeners; and for some days – not all this fortnight, indeed, but the bigger and earlier half of it – she had been completely happy in her own mild ruminative manner. It had been a source of great satisfaction to compare the rival merits of the two systems: London on the one hand; on the other, being in disgrace. For the sight of the hot square garden, she had here this cool, green lawn; for the riband of dull wood pavement up Grosvenor Street, the silver line of the Thames; for the companionship of languid and heated mankind, the eager dogs; and for the hopeless tedium of a ball, the cool vast night pouring in through the open windows of the drawing-room.

This idyllic attitude towards life in general had lasted ten days or so, but during the last four she no longer tried to conceal from herself her mind had changed. The weather, perhaps, became rather hotter, or she more languid; in any case, though she cared no less for the dogs and the riot of vegetable life, she missed something. And that something, she was beginning to be afraid, was people. Again and again she arrived at this same disheartening conclusion, and though, as many times, she went over in her mind the list of the people whom it was possible she might miss, and found none desirable, it was none the less true that she missed them en masse. Imagining them with her now, one by one, she would have wished each of them away, but with them all away there was something lacking. "Perhaps they are like a tonic," she said to herself. "One doesn't want to take it, but one is the better for it."

She sat up in her hammock and surveyed her surroundings. The book she had brought out to read had fallen, crumple-edged, on the grass, and looking at the back, even the very title came as new to her. Dogs in various stages of exhaustion were stretched round her, and at the sound of her movement tails thumped the grass, but otherwise none stirred. Overhead, the chestnut with green five-fingered leaves drooped in the heat, and stars of wavering light fell through the interspaces of foliage on to her dress. To the right the hay, already tall and ripe to die, stood motionless in the dead calm; and the scent of clover and flowering grass, which in the morning had been wafted in flow and ebb of varying scent, hung heavy and stagnant in the air. Southwards the river was a sheet of glass; a centreboard, hopelessly becalmed, lay with flapping sail in the middle, and a splashed line of broken water showed the paddling efforts of its master. To this side lay the lawn; the croquet hoops were up, and leaning against the stick was a mallet; four balls in as uninteresting position lay immobilized here and there, the débris of a game, red versus blue, which Maud had begun that morning, but had found her honesty or her interest unable to cope with. Beyond was the house, bandaged as to the windows with green sun-blinds, and empty but for Maud's maid, who was in love with the caretaker, who adored the kitchenmaid-cook, who adored nobody. There was also the caretaker's wife, and nobody adored her.

The path which led from the lawn to the river was concealed by a lilac-bush from Maud's hammock, and it was with a sudden quickening of the pulse that she heard a crisp step passing along it. It was a man's tread, so much was certain; it was certain also that it did not belong to any of the gardeners, all of whose steps, Maud had noticed, were marked by a sort of drowsy cumbersomeness, like people who are walking about a dark room. Soon the crisp step paused and began to retrace itself, left the gravel for the grass, and in another moment Anthony Maxwell came round the lilac-bush.

Maud did not feel in the least surprised; her unconscious self had probably guessed who it was. She rose from her sitting position on the hammock, but gave him no word or gesture of greeting.

"I came down on my motor-car," he said. "It was particularly hot. May I sit here a little while and get cool?"

"By all means," said Maud. Then, after a pause, "Do you think it was right of you to come?" she said.

"I don't think anything about it," he said; "I had to."

Maud hardened and retreated into herself.

"You mean, I suppose, that my mother insisted on it," she said, with a cold resentment in her voice.

"Your mother does not know I have come," said he. "I should have told her, but I thought she would probably have forbidden me."

"Indeed she would not," said Maud. "She would certainly have encouraged you."

"That would have been just as bad," said Anthony.

Suddenly Maud felt stimulated. During all this fortnight neither the gardeners nor the dogs had said anything so interesting. She sat down again.

"I should like you to explain that," she said, without confessing to herself that explanation was unnecessary or that she wished to hear him explain.

"You are sure?" he said.

"Quite."

"It is this, then," said he – "we have both been put in a false position. We have been urged to marry each other, and you have refused me. It has not been fair on either of us. In spite of the pressure which has been put upon you, you have refused me; in spite of the pressure put upon me, I want nothing else in the world but that you should marry me. Mind, I quite sympathize with you, for if there is anything in the world which would make one wish never to see a person again, it is to have that person persistently hurled at one. I have been hurled at you. That is one of the reasons why I came here, to tell you that I sympathize with you. I am afraid people have made me an uncommon nuisance to you."

Anthony paused, raised his eyes a moment, and saw that Maud was looking at him steadily, with grave consideration in her face. He felt, rightly, that never before had she given him such favourable attention.

"I am not such a coxcomb as to suppose that you would have given me a different answer if you had not quite naturally been 'put off' by the way in which you have been treated," he continued; "but I do ask you to remember that I have scarcely had a fair chance. Please try to think that it has not been my fault."

"No; it has been my mother's," said Maud.

"Yes, it has been her fault. I suppose she thought that continued perseverance would have some effect. It may or may not have had the opposite effect to what she intended, but certainly not that."

"It has had the opposite effect," said Maud.

"Are you sure?"

"I am now."

"Can you try and banish it from your mind?"

"I will try."

Anthony, again looked at her, and his heart hammered against his ribs. But even though he scarcely felt master of himself, he did not lose his wisdom and press this point further.

"I do not hope to win you," he said, "by making myself importunate, and perhaps, now I think of it, it was not wise of me to come. But I am not sorry I came; nor do I give up hope. Very likely that is presumptuous of me; but for myself, I am sure that I shall not change."

He sat on the ground playing with the ear of one of the dogs, but as he said these last words his fingers made a sudden violent movement, and the dog whimpered. "There, there!" he said, and fell to stroking it again quietly.

"You said that this was one of the reasons why you came," said Maud. "What was the other?"

"There was only one other. I wanted to see you. I was drawn by cords," he said.

"Poor Mr. Anthony," said she very quietly, and there was no shade of irony in her voice.

"Thank you for that," he said.

Maud lifted her feet off the ground, and swung gently to and fro in the hammock. She was naturally very reserved, and in matters of the emotions still extraordinarily ignorant, and it would have puzzled her to say exactly what she felt now. It was no tearing or violent emotion, no storm, but rather the strong, serene press of a flowing tide. Hitherto the human race, whether considered individually or collectively, had not much occupied her, but something now within her quickened and stirred and moved, and she was certainly at this moment not indifferent to this plain young man who was so modest and so self-assured. There was more about him to be learned than she had known, and that book just opening promised to interest her. Of passion she felt no touch, but her "poor Mr. Anthony" had contained authentic pity.

"You are quite right," she said. "Your various advantages have been constantly told me by my mother. All the things which seemed to her such excellent causes why I should marry you seemed to me to be very bad causes indeed; but they were represented to me as most urgent. I did not find them so." She paused, and Anthony said nothing, feeling that some further word was on her lips. "I like you," she said at length. "Come and have tea."

The moment she had said it she was afraid that he would do something stupid, look fervent, even seize her hand. But she need not have been afraid. Anthony rose at once.

"Oh, do let us have tea," he said; "I am longing for it."

Maud's relief was great.

"It was stupid of me," she said. "Won't you have a whisky-and-soda? You must be awfully thirsty."

"No, I should prefer tea, thanks," he said. "I hate drinks at odd times. How lovely your garden looks!"

"Yes; but it's still rather backward. The chestnut-flowers should be out by now, and they are still hardly budding."

"How can you remember that?"

"Oh, if one takes an interest in things, it is difficult to forget about them," said Maud.

"That is perfectly true," remarked Anthony.

Soon after tea he left again, and took the white riband of the Bath Road back into London. He could not help telling himself that he had prospered beyond all expectation; and if he had been, as he had told Maud, not hopeless before, he was, it may be supposed, on the sunny side of hope now. But he intended to stop, once and for all, the risk of mismanagement on the part of others, and having reached home he went straight to his mother's room.

"I've been down to Windsor," said he, "and I had tea with Maud Brereton – alone."

"You haven't got a spark of proper pride, Anthony," said his mother with some heat. "To go dangling and mooning after a girl who's refused you flat! I wonder what she sets up to be!"

"I think she sets up to be herself," said Anthony. "It is rather rare. I like it. But I want to manage my own affair in my own way. I particularly wish Lady Brereton not to say a word more of any kind to Maud. I should like you to tell her so if you have an opportunity."

"Why, I'm sure she's been as eager as anybody," said Lady Maxwell.

"I shall not succeed with her because her mother wishes it," said Anthony. "I'll play my hand alone, please."

In London, in the meantime, the fact that Maud had refused him had become generally known, and London, with that admirable substitute for altruism which is so characteristic of it, and consists in vividly concerning one's self with those things that do not in the least concern one, had been very voluble on the subject. There was scarcely any divergence in the views expressed, and everybody was agreed that it was a terrible thing for poor Mildred to find she had for a daughter so obstinate and wrong-headed a girl. "Why, the Maxwells roll, my dear – simply roll! Of course, Maud is wonderfully good-looking, and no doubt lots of other men will be after her, but why not have accepted Anthony provisionally? It is always so easy to let it be understood, if anything else turned up, that a young girl like that hadn't known her own mind – "

On the top of this there leaked out the fact that Marie Alston had strongly dissuaded her from it, and the world, with the agility and restlessness of monkeys, leaped to the new topic. Really Marie was getting a little too strong! It was all very well to scatter those amusing and general criticisms on people in general, and take the unworldly pose; but when it came to putting her finger in the wheels of the Society watch, so to speak, and stopping them from turning, it was too much. How on earth were struggling mothers to hope to get their daughters happily – yes, happily – married, if idealistic snowflakes were ready to descend upon them at street corners and forbid the banns. Over this Society grinned and showed its teeth for a little while, and then was off again on a fresh tack. How would Mildred behave to Marie? Here there were wheels within wheels, and the upshot was that Society was not at all sure that there had not been a break on one side or the other between Jack and her. Given that certain things had come to Marie's ear, it would account for everything. What an ingenious revenge, too, on Marie's part! Really, she was a person of brains. It required cool thinking to hit upon a riposte like that.

After this, sensation came hard on the heels of sensation. Mildred began to be mentioned in the same breath as Jim Spencer, and, far more remarkable, Jack began to be mentioned in the same breath as his wife. They had dined out together twice last week; they had been together to party after party. How curious and interesting! A complete resorting of the cards, and without any fuss whatever; and the honour, as usual, in Marie's hand. In one partie she had recaptured her husband, shunted off her admirer on to Mildred, scored heavily against her, all the time with her nose in the air, as unapproachable and distinguished as ever. But meanwhile Lady Ardingly sat like a spider in the middle of her web. The threads had extended farther than even she had originally planned, but she did not object in the least to that. And when people came and told her the news, she was less severe than usual.

"Ah, my dear!" she would say, "how you fly about, and gather honey and all sorts of curious other things! And I sit here. I never know anything except what you are good enough to come and tell me. And so Jack is amouraché again of his wife? So charming, is she not? Let us play Bridge immediately."