Part 6

For a moment he believed her to be one of the cook-housekeepers with whom he and Bella had grappled during the earlier days of their married life. But no, this short stout woman with the shrewd, powerful face Germaine seemed to know, did not look like a servant. Even he could see that her black clothes were handsome and costly, if rather too warm for a fine July day. Her thin, nervous-looking companion was also dressed with some pretension and research, but she lacked the other's look of stout prosperity.

They were typical Londoners, of the kind to be seen on the route of every Royal procession, and standing among the crowd outside the church door at every fashionable marriage--women who, if they had lived in the London of the Georges, would have walked a good many miles to see a fellow-creature swing. But to Oliver Germaine they were simply a couple of unattractive-looking women, one of whom he thought he had seen before, and whose proximity was faintly disagreeable.

Germaine's mind had dwelt on them longer than it would otherwise have done because, when just in front of him, they stopped short and hesitated; then, looking round them much as Germaine himself had looked round a few minutes before, and, the elder woman taking the lead, each dragged a chair forward, and sat down a yard or so to the young man's right, the trunk of the tree stretching its gnarled grey girth between.

Seven minutes of the ten Oliver meant to allow Fanny had now gone by, and he felt inclined to cut the other three minutes short, and go straight home. After all, it was too bad of her to be so unpunctual!

And then, striking on his ear, shreds of the conversation which was taking place between the two women sitting near him began to penetrate Oliver Germaine's brain. Names fell on his ear--Christian names, surnames, with which he was familiar, evoking the personalities of men and women with whom he was on terms of acquaintance, in some cases of close friendship.

Unconsciously his clasped hands tightened on the knob of his stick, and he caught himself listening--listening with a queer mixture of morbid interest and growing disgust.

It was the elder woman who spoke the most, and she was a good speaker, with that trick,--self-taught, instinctive,--of making the people of whom she was speaking leap up before the listener. Now and again she was interrupted by little shrieks of astonishment and horror--her companion's way of paying tribute to the interesting nature of the conversation.

How on earth--so Oliver Germaine asked himself with heating cheek--had the woman obtained her peculiarly intimate knowledge of those of whom she was speaking? The people, these men and women, especially women, whose lives, the inner cores of whose existences, were being probed and ruthlessly exposed, almost all belonged to the Germaines' own particular set,--if indeed such a prosperous and popular couple as were Oliver and Bella, could be said to have a particular set in that delightful world into which they had only comparatively lately effected an entrance, and of which the strands all intermingle the one with the other.

Germaine was too young, he had been too happy, he was too instinctively kindly, to concern himself with other people's private affairs, save in a wholly impersonal fashion. He had always avoided the hidden, unspoken side of life; when certain secrets were confided to him they dropped quickly out of his mind; ugly gossip passed him by.

Yet now he found himself listening to very ugly gossip; some feeling outside himself, some instinct which for the moment mastered him, made him stay on there, eavesdropping.

For the moment the stream of venom was directed against Mrs. Slade, the pretty, harmless little woman whom he would see within the next hour sitting at his own table. She was one of Bella's special friends, and Oliver had got quite fond of her, the more so that he was well aware that she was in a difficult position, owing to the fact, not of her seeking, or so the Germaines believed, that her husband spent most of his life away from her, abroad.

In this special case, Germaine knew something of the hidden wounds; it was horrible to hear this--this old devil engaged in plucking the scabs from these same wounds, and exposing to her vulgar companion the shifts to which the unfortunate little woman was put. Nay, more, she said certain things concerning Mrs. Slade which, if they were true, or even only half true, made the poor little soul under discussion no fit friend or companion for Germaine's own spotless wife, Bella....

The burden of the old woman's talk was money, how people got money, how they spent money, how they did without money. That was the idea running through all her conversation, although it was, of course, concerned with many uglier things than money.

Had they been men speaking Germaine would have been sufficiently filled with righteous indignation to have found words with which to rebuke, even to threaten them, but they were women, common women, and he felt tongue-tied, helpless.

And then, suddenly, there leapt into the conversation his own name, or rather that of his wife, the woman of whom he felt so exultantly, so selflessly proud. The allusion came in the form of a question, a question spoken in a shrill and odious Cockney accent.

"I should like to see that Mrs. Germaine. I wonder if she ever comes into the Park----"

"Not she! At any rate not on Sunday. Why she'd be mobbed!" snapped out the other.

"You don't say so! Do people run after her as much as that?"

"There's been nothing like it since Mrs. Jersey. I used to see people get up on chairs to see Mrs. Jersey go by. Not that I ever thought much of her figure--great, ugly, square shoulders. She started those square shoulders, and they've never really died out."

"Mrs. Germaine's quite another sort of beauty, the pocket Venus style, isn't she? I suppose you've had a lot to do with making her the rage," said the friend admiringly.

"I don't know about that--her kind of figure dresses itself. She's the sort that gets there anyhow. She's got that 'jennysayquoy' air, as the French put it, that makes folk turn round and stare. She gets her looks from her mother; I remember the mother--her name was Arabin--when I was with Cerise. They weren't London people--they was military. Mrs. Arabin had such pretty coaxing ways, same as the daughter has. Cerise used to let her have the things ever so much cheaper than she charged her other customers, but it paid her too."

Germaine breathed a little more easily. He knew now who this woman was. She was a certain Mrs. Bliss, Bella's dressmaker, in her way a famous old lady, whom Bella's set greatly preferred to the other dressmakers in vogue. It was Mrs. Bliss, so he remembered having heard, who had introduced some years ago the picturesque style of dressing with which his sister Fanny found such fault, and which remains loftily indifferent to the fashion.

Oliver recollected now where and when he had seen her; there had been some little trouble about an item in his wife's bill, and Bella had made him go with her to face the formidable Mrs. Bliss in the old-fashioned house in Sackville Street where the dressmaker wielded her powerful sceptre. That was before Bella had become a fashionable beauty, and Mrs. Bliss had been rather short with them both, unwilling to admit that she was wrong, although the figures proving her so stared her in the face.

And then Germaine remembered other occasions with which Mrs. Bliss's name, though not her personality, were associated. He had made out cheques to her, larger cheques than Bella could manage out of her allowance. But that was some time ago; his wife must now have given up dealing with her; and he felt glad, very glad, that this was so. A woman with such a tongue was a danger to society,--not that anyone need believe a word she said....

Suddenly the shrill Cockney voice asked yet another question concerning the beautiful Mrs. Germaine. It was couched in what the speaker would probably have described as perfectly ladylike and delicate language, but its purport was unmistakable, and Germaine made a restless movement; then he became almost rigidly still--a man cannot turn and strike a woman on the mouth.

"N-o-o, I don't think so." Mrs. Bliss spoke guardedly. "She's a lot of gentlemen buzzing around her, but that's only to be expected; and as far as I can hear there's not one that buzzes closer than another. To tell you the truth, Sophy, I'm puzzled about those Germaines. It's no business of mine, of course, but she spends three times as much as she did when I first began dressing her and she don't mind now what she does pay,--very different to what she used to do! It's only the best that's good enough for my lady now."

"Germaine's an army chap, isn't he?"

"He was--and a handsome fellow he is, too. He came into a good bit of money just after they got married, but that must be melting pretty quick. Why, she goes everywhere! Last season she really wore her clothes out. They"--she waved her hand comprehensively round a vague area comprising Marylebone and Mayfair--"scratched and fought with each other in order to get her."

"Then I suppose you don't bother about your money."

"Yes, I do," said Mrs. Bliss shortly. "I'm not that kind; I don't work for the King of Prussia, as my French tailor used to say."

There was a pause, and then in a rather different voice Mrs. Bliss went on, "I _do_ get my money from Mrs. Germaine, but lately,--well, I won't say lately, but for the last eighteen months or so, _she's always paid me in notes_, two, three, sometimes four hundred pounds at a time, always in five-pound notes."

She spoke in a low voice, and yet, to Oliver Germaine, it seemed as if she shouted the words aloud.

The young man got up, and, careless of the lateness of the hour, walked away without looking around towards the Marble Arch; so alone could he be sure that Mrs. Bliss would not see him, and perchance leap to the recollection of who he was.

The words the woman had said so quietly seemed to be reverberating with loud insistence in his ear: "_She's always paid me in notes._" "_Two, three, sometimes four hundred pounds._"

What exactly had Mrs. Bliss meant by this statement? What significance had she intended it to carry? There had been a touch of regret in the hard voice, a hesitation in the way she had conveyed the pregnant confidence, which made Oliver heartsick to remember.

But after a time, as Oliver Germaine walked quickly along, uncaring as to which way he was going, almost running in his desire to outstrip his own thoughts, there came a little lightening of his bewildered misery. It was possible, just possible, that Mrs. Bliss was really thinking of some other customer.

Notes? The idea was really absurd to anyone who knew Bella, as he, Oliver, thank God, knew his wife! Why, there was never any loose money in the house, both he and Bella were always running short of petty cash.

Then the young man remembered, with a sudden tightening of the heart, that this had not been the case lately. During the last few months, since they had moved into their new house, Bella had always had money--plenty of sixpences and shillings, half crowns and half sovereigns--at his disposal. Nay more, looking back, he realised that his wife no longer teased him, as she had once perpetually teased him, for supplements, large or small, to her allowance; he had to face the fact that of late Bella's allowance had borne a surprising resemblance to the widow's cruse; it had actually sufficed for all her wants.

But he had been unsuspecting, utterly unsuspecting, and even now he hardly knew what he did suspect.

The horrible things he had heard Mrs. Bliss say about other people acted and reacted on Germaine's imagination. If these things were true, then the world in which he and Bella lived was corrupt and rotten; and, as even Oliver Germaine knew by personal experience, pitch defiles. If Daphne Slade did the things Mrs. Bliss implied she did, Bella must know it,--know it and condone it. Bella was far too clever to be taken in, as he, Oliver, had been taken in, by Mrs. Slade's pretty pathetic manner, and appealing eyes. If Mrs. Slade took money from men, what an example, what a model----Germaine's mind refused to complete the thought.

Certain of Oliver's and Bella's old acquaintances--people whom they were too kind to drop, but of whom they couldn't see as much now as they had once done, in the days before Bella became a famous beauty--would sometimes hint darkly as to the wickedness of some of the people they knew. Even Fanny had told him bluntly that Bella had got into a very fast set. "Fast" was the word his sister had used, and it had diverted him.

But was it possible that these people, whom he had thought envious and silly--and that Fanny, his rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned sister,--had been right after all? Was it possible that like so many husbands of whom he had heard, for whom he had felt contempt and pity, he had--as regarded his own cherished wife--lived in a fool's paradise?

Germaine now remembered several things that he had known--known and thought forgotten--for they had been completely apart from his own life. He recalled the case of a man in his own regiment who had shot himself three days after his wife's death. It had been publicly given out that the poor fellow had been mad--distraught with grief; but there had been many to mutter that the truth was far other, and that the man had made a shameful discovery among his dead wife's papers....

Concerning any other woman than Bella, Germaine would have admitted, perhaps reluctantly,--but still, if asked the plain question, he would have admitted, that women are damned tricky creatures, and that--well, that you never can tell!

Again, out of the past, there came back to him, with horrid vividness, the memory of a brief episode which at the time had filled him with a kind of pity, even sympathy.

It was at a ball; he was quite a youngster, in fact it was the year after he had joined, and a woman sitting out with him in a conservatory had fallen into intimate talk, as people so often do amid unfamiliar surroundings. There came a moment when she said to him, with burning, unhappy eyes, "People think I'm a good woman, but I'm not." And she had hurried on to make the nature of her sinning quite clear; she had not passion for her excuse--only lack of means and love of luxury. He had been startled, staggered by the unasked-for confidence--and yet he had not thought much the worse of her; now, retrospectively, he judged her with terrible severity.

But _Bella_? The thought of Bella in such company was inconceivable; and yet, deep in Oliver Germaine's heart, there grew from the seed sown by Mrs. Bliss a upas tree which for the moment overshadowed everything. He was torn with anguished jealousy, which made him forget, excepting as affording a proof of what he feared, the sordid, horrible question of the money.

Germaine had already been jealous of Bella, jealous before their marriage, and jealous since, but that feeling had been nothing, _nothing_ to that which now held him in its grip.

As a girl, Bella had been a flirt, and, as she had since confessed more than once, she had loved to make Oliver miserable. Then, for some time after their marriage he had been angered at the way she had welcomed and courted admiration. But he had never doubted her, never for a moment thought that her love was leaving him, still less that her flirtations held any really sinister intent. He now remembered how a man, a fool of a fellow, had once brought her a beautiful jewel by way of a Christmas gift; but it had annoyed her, and, without saying anything about it to Oliver at the time, she had actually made the man take back his present!

Was it conceivable that in three or four short years Bella could have entirely altered--have become to all intents and purposes, not only another woman, but a woman of a type,--as even he was well aware, a very common type,--he would not have cared to hear mentioned in her presence?

Germaine was now at the Marble Arch. After a moment's bewildered hesitation, he went up Oxford Street, and then took a turning which would ultimately lead him home; home where Bella must be impatiently awaiting him--home where their intimates had already doubtless gathered together for lunch.

And then, during his walk through the now deserted and sun-baked streets and byways of Mayfair, Oliver Germaine passed in slow review the men and the women who composed his own and Bella's intimate circle. They rose in blurred outline against the background of his memory, and gradually the women fell out, and only the men remained,--two men, for Henry Buck did not count.

Which of these two men who came about his house in the guise of close friends, had planned to steal, to buy, the wife on whose absolute purity and honour he would an hour ago have staked his life?

Germaine's fevered mind leapt on Bob Uvedale. What were Uvedale's relations, his real relations, with Bella? Oliver, so he now told himself sorely, was not quite a fool; he had known men who hid the deepest, tenderest--he would not say the most dishonourable--feelings, towards a married woman, under the skilful pretence of frank laughing flirtation.

Uvedale, when all was said and done, was an adventurer, living on his wits. He talked of his poverty, talked of it over-much, but he often made considerable sums of money; in fact twice, in moments of unwonted expansiveness, Uvedale had offered to put Germaine on to a "good thing," to share with him a tip which had been given him by one of his financial friends. Germaine now remembered, with a sick feeling of anger, how seriously annoyed Bella had been to find that her husband had refused to have anything to do with it; nay more, how she had taunted him afterwards when the "good thing" had turned out good after all. But that was long ago, when they had first known Uvedale.

They now knew Uvedale too well--at least Bella did. Oliver was an outdoor man; he hated crowds. He remembered how often Uvedale took his place as Bella's companion at those semi-public gatherings, charity fêtes, and so on, which apparently amused her, and where the presence of the beautiful Mrs. Germaine was always eagerly desired.

Germaine's mind next glanced with jealous anguished suspicion at another man who was constantly with Bella--Peter Joliffe.

There was a great, almost a ludicrous, contrast between Uvedale and Joliffe. Uvedale, so Germaine dimly realised even now, was a man with a wider, more generous, outlook on life than the other, capable of deeper depths, of higher heights.

Joliffe was well off; and, as the Germaines had been told very early in their acquaintance with him, he had the reputation of being "near." But Bella and Oliver had both agreed that this was not true. Only the other day Bella had spoken very warmly of Joliffe; when they had moved into their new house he had given them a Sheraton bureau, a very charming and certainly by no means a cheap piece of old furniture. Oliver had supposed it to be a delicate way of paying back some of their constant hospitality, for Joliffe was perpetually with Bella.

Time after time Germaine had come in and found Joliffe sitting with her; walking through the hall he had heard her peals of laughter at Joliffe's witticisms, the funny things he said with his serious face.

But after all jesters are men of like passions to their melancholy brethren; they can, and do, throw off the grinning mask. Bella had said, only yesterday, "There's more in Peter than you think, Oliver. Believe me, there is!" Bella always called Joliffe Peter,--she was more formal with Bob Uvedale.

Germaine now reminded himself that Joliffe did not like Uvedale, and that Uvedale did not like Joliffe. There seemed a deep, unspoken antagonism between the two men, who were yet so constantly meeting. Joliffe had gone so far as to say something--not exactly disagreeable, but condemnatory--of Uvedale's city connections, to Germaine. Joliffe was annoyed, distinctly annoyed at the way Bella went about with Uvedale, and by the fact that she often introduced him to people whose acquaintance she had herself made through Joliffe.

What had he, Oliver Germaine, been about, to allow his wife to become so intimate with two men, of whom he knew nothing? Yesterday he would have said Uvedale and Joliffe were his closest pals. But what did he really know of either of them--of their secret thoughts--their deep desires and ambitions--their shames and secret sins? Nothing--nothing. Bella's husband knew as little of Uvedale and Joliffe--in fact, till to-day, far less than they knew of him, for one or the other of these men was his enemy, and had betrayed, very basely, his hospitality.

Germaine had now lashed himself into the certainty that he was that most miserable and pitiable of civilised beings, the trusting, kindly, nay more, adoring husband, whose wife betrays him with his friend.

When others had laughed, as men have laughed, and will ever laugh, at similar ironic juxtapositions of fate, Germaine had remained grave, for he had a sensitive heart--a heart which made him realise something of what lay beneath such tales. Now he told himself that so no doubt he himself was being laughed at by the many, pitied--the thought stung deeper--by the few.

As he at last turned into Curzon Street, and so was within a few yards of his house, it struck two o'clock. By now they must all be waiting for him, and Bella would be angry, as angry as she ever allowed her sweet-tempered nature to be. But Germaine told himself savagely that he didn't care,--he was sorry to be so near home, to know that in a few moments he would have to command himself, to pretend light-hearted indifference before a crowd of people most of whom he now feared--ay, feared and hated, for they must all have long suspected what he only now knew to be the truth.

Some one touched him. He started violently. It was his sister, Fanny, pouring out a confused stream of apologies and explanations. He stared at her in silence, and she thought he was so seriously annoyed, so "put out" that he could not trust himself to speak.

But though, as they stood there face to face, he dimly realised what his sister was trying to say, how she was trying to explain her failure to keep her appointment with him in the Park, Germaine could not have told, had his life depended on it, the nature of her excuse.

Together they walked side by side to the door of his house, and, as he rang the bell, as he knocked, he remembered with a pang of jealous anguish that Bella had asked him, when they moved into this house, not to use a latch-key in the daytime; she had explained to him that to do so prevented the servants keeping up to the mark, and he had obeyed her, as he always did obey her. This trifle made his anger, for the moment his impotent anger, become colder, clarified.

It was only an hour later, but at last they were all gone, these people whom Oliver Germaine had now begun to hate and suspect, each in their different measure, women and men. Everyone had left, that is, excepting Henry Buck and Fanny; and Fanny was just going away, Oliver seeing her off at the front door.