Part 22

The ladies were shopping, he was informed, and he was shown up to the small drawing-room to await them. But the small drawing-room would not hold him, and he roamed about the beautiful rooms whose furniture and decorations had once whispered to him of sweet love-tragedies, as well as of terrible dramas involving the collapse into blood or obscurity of the historic families that had loved them. But to-day they had no confidences for Ordham. He came upon a door ajar. It led into a small room that he had never seen, but he did not hesitate to enter, as Mrs. Cutting had made him feel at home long since. He saw at a glance that this must be Mabel’s boudoir, and drew back. Beyond the threshold, however, he was powerless to retreat; he stood trembling, fascinated, feeling himself in the presence of a subtle betrayal of the secrecies of maidenhood,—such as he sometimes fancied emanated from the young girl herself. He had never dreamed that a girl could be so sacred and beautiful, so mysterious a creature. He turned pale and lost his breath.

It was a very simple room to his masculine eye, with its white flowered silks and white enamelled furniture, but as unmistakably luxurious as the rest of the house. Suddenly his eye was caught by a bookcase above the writing table. This temptation was irresistible, and in a moment he was eagerly scanning the titles of the haughty beauty’s chosen literature. It was with something of a shock that he discovered the books to be the essays of Macaulay, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and a selected volume of Shakspere’s plays, as he had read all of these works and more in his earliest teens. It could not be possible that this represented the girl’s idea of erudition, her mother’s disappointment in her beauty’s untimely development of bookish tastes? But what of it? Ordham was too far gone in love and despair to be seriously affected by a minor disappointment, although it might have staggered him a month earlier. Poor ambitious child! What opportunities at a fashionable school in Paris, studying “art,” music, and three languages, to delve into literature! If she had but just begun to read, at least she had not begun with trash, and that she had begun at all was the vital point. Again he was turning away, and again he received a shock. The drawer of the desk was half open. His gaze, as it dropped from the bookcase, rested upon three letters from his mother. The ink was fresh. The postmark was conspicuously “Paris.”

He afterwards described his sensations at that moment as of a lighted torch trying to force its way from the base of his skull through the dull inert mass of his brain to his upper consciousness. But at a certain stage love is a disease analogous to death. The brain, if not disintegrated, is very nearly so, for it is worn out by implacable thought, despair, brooding on the impossible. It is, after long tension, a flabby mass, through which the angry watchers in the subconsciousness can find no avenue, force not a cry of warning. Normally with a brain so alert that the utmost caution and tact were necessary in the handling of him, even although his full share of masculine vanity made him as easy game as most men, the least slip would have roused Ordham’s suspicions and set him on his guard; but, his brain demoralized by the greensickness of love, he was as far beyond rescue as if he had been born a fool.

He was staring stupidly at the letters, mechanically striving to reach their significance, when a footstep on the polished floor of the drawing-room made him retreat hastily, trembling at the prospect of confronting the indignant Mabel and receiving summary dismissal. So great was his discomposure he did not notice that the footsteps were too heavy for a woman, and was astonished to confront a young man, an uncommonly good-looking young man, with a frank well-bred face and an athletic spare figure. Ordham divined at once that here was the handsome American cousin whose advent he had dreaded. Unconsciously he threw back his own shoulders. His eyes became excessively cold, his manner almost unbearably polite.

“No doubt you are Mr. Driscom,” he said. “Mrs. Cutting has spoken of you to me.”

“And you are Mr. Ordham, of course.” The American shook the Englishman warmly by the hand, but received no sort of pressure in response. He wondered, as he had done during previous visits to London, what American women could see in Englishmen.

“Mrs. Cutting is my second cousin,” he said. “She has often mentioned you in her letters. The butler tells me they will be back in a moment. I suppose we may smoke.”

His voice was agreeable and cultivated, his manner easy and cordial. Ordham noticed with intense annoyance that there was nothing here to ridicule and despise. Margarethe Styr had talked to him of this fine type of the young American, and Driscom reminded him of the gallant youth who had stood by her to the last on the wrecked steamer. He felt that in ordinary circumstances he should have warmed to him, but now he hated and feared him; were thought as potent as one day it may be, poor Driscom would have expired of poison in every vein.

But the American, who seemed drawn to that courteous smiling exterior, talked amiably of the yachting news in the evening telegrams, and of yachting in general, smoking steadily the while. It was manifest that he felt quite at home, was doing the honors, in fact! No doubt he would be staying in the house, these Americans were so infernally hospitable.

Fortunately the tête-à-tête was not long enough to exhaust Ordham’s falling stock of patience. Mrs. Cutting swept into the room, followed by Mabel and LaLa. Driscom sprang to his feet and kissed his second cousin warmly. Ordham held his breath, expecting to commit murder were Mabel also saluted. When the young lady merely held out her hand with a radiant smile, his apprehension increased. A kiss might have meant nothing. Were they not cousins and old friends? This formality—before him—might be portentous.

But Mrs. Cutting gave him little time for thought. She apologized for being late, dilated upon “their” disappointment at his desertion of them earlier in the day, and insisted that he remain informally for dinner. He replied with cold decision, and with a full return of his old dignity, that he must “wander along,” as he was dining with some friends and had promised to look in upon others. “People were returning to town.” He had made up his mind that he would not even tell them of his intended departure; a note posted at the station would suffice. Mrs. Cutting, who had regarded him intently, laid her hand firmly on his arm. “I shall not let you go yet awhile,” she said. “I must confer with Bobby at once, so that he may cable to-night, and meanwhile please talk to Mabel until I can come back and pour out the tea.”

She gave him no chance to reply. Taking “Bobby” by the arm, she swept him out the room, darting a swift look of command at her daughter.

Mabel turned pale, but she came forward with her usual girlish grace. “Do sit down,” she said. “You look as if you never intended to sit down again.”

“It is not worth while to sit down—to detain you. I really must go.”

“You don’t intend to come back!”

He looked steadily into her dilated eyes, wondering if he hated her, and betrayed himself. “No,” he said. “I shall not come back.” Then he paused abruptly, and physically braced himself. She had dropped her eyelashes, and he was quite prepared for the coquettish net that would float from those slowly uplifting orbs. But when he met them, he saw only terror and appeal. Mabel’s face looked suddenly pinched and white. Then she burst into tears, and he was swept on that flood straight through the gates of Paradise.

When they descended to earth and were seated on a little sofa in the remotest corner, he demanded an explanation of the torments imposed upon him during the past fortnight. “You say you have always loved me,” he said with automatic masculine logic. “Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you accept me the first time?”

“I couldn’t be sure—that you really loved me—you seemed to me to be taken by surprise. Besides, I think I wanted to punish you for not having loved me all that long time. I had to be rude and horrid—it was that or betray myself. I don’t think I ever believed that you really loved me till just now. I don’t believe you knew it yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I did,” he replied grimly. “I was so far gone that I became utterly uninteresting.”

“No—but you made me believe that you were miserable because you had proposed to me impulsively and could not think of a way out of it. My only consolation was that I had refused you. But I was ashamed every time I thought of how I had led you on that day—and I had vowed never to be silly and flirt again. And then—well, it cannot be denied that mother has thrown me at your head, and that made me really hate you at times, so that it was easier to be rude.”

“Your mother was beautifully frank.” Ordham was somewhat confused by the number of apologetic reasons advanced, but wholly happy. They talked more or less wildly for an hour. Then Ordham, hearing the swish of Mrs. Cutting’s gown, stood up, flushed and nervous, but so determined not to look sheepish, that he was as formal as an aged diplomatist when his future mother-in-law took both his hands and looked at him with eyes that were really soft. “Thank heaven!” she said with the simplicity appropriate to great moments. “I know that you will both be happy. And how grateful I am that you have not put off making up your minds any longer. Bobby tells me that I must go to New York. It is imperative. But now I can leave Mabel with you, instead of drying her eyes and distracting her mind for six months, when I should be giving all my attention to business.”

Of course he remained to dinner, and before he left he had another half-hour alone with Mabel. An excellent repast, the interesting conversation of Driscom, whom he now liked as much as he had hated a few hours earlier, unruffled bliss, and the prospect of almost immediate marriage, had clarified and braced his normally acute and steady brain. They were sitting among the fragrant flowers of the balcony when he told her abruptly of his incursion into her private little domain, and added: “As it has excited my curiosity, I may as well tell you at once that I saw several letters from my mother in the drawer of your desk, and ask you to explain. I do not want to be annoyed by petty imaginings. You don’t mind?”

The hand he held had grown cold, but when he turned his head he met suffused and smiling eyes.

“I might as well confess! I wrote to Lady Bridgminster imploring her to withdraw her opposition—not to hate me—I know how great her influence over you is—”

“She has not a particle of influence over me. What did she reply? How enchanting of you!”

“Oh, she was quite nice. I believe she said that she had washed her hands of the matter of your marriage, since you would not marry Lady Rosamond. Should you like to read the letters?” She half rose.

“Of course not.” And knowing somewhat of the fecundity of the feminine pen, it did not strike him as odd that his mother should have found it worth while to write this epitome of her disgust three times.

XXXVII ORDHAM CEASES TO BE ORIGINAL

For a day or two Ordham could hardly believe in his good fortune, so suddenly had it descended upon him. When separated from Mabel he moved as in a dream, looking preternaturally serious lest he wear a fatuous grin. But this phase passed and he settled down to the business of being supremely happy, or as happy as possible while happiness was still incomplete. He thanked the American fates for the business complications that called Mrs. Cutting to New York and hastened the wedding, which was to take place early in October. Lady Bridgminster had written two frigid letters of congratulation, which Ordham and Mabel smilingly compared; but, being in Paris, graciously offered to confer with the great milliner who had the honour of dressing the young beauty, and spare her and her mother the miseries of crossing the Channel and of French hotels.

Ordham had never felt so young. Having cared little for girls and greatly for women of the world, he had been, and in spite of his precocity and cleverness, under an unconscious strain for several years past. He had always been “playing up,” as Hélène Wass once expressed it, when she may have felt—who knows?—a moment’s pity for him. Now, he had the sensation that Life, having long cheated him, was making sudden and wondrous restitution. It was that perfect flower of youth in Mabel that called to him as potently as her beauty and her high-bred grace and charm. He no longer cared what she read; she declared herself too happy to think of books, and he replied that they were writing a great romance of their own; time enough for other men’s unlifelike vapourings later. He did not see her often alone, and these sweet brief interviews gave a romantic intensity to their engagement which London might not have offered to a pair less severely chaperoned; although, to be sure, that exotic mansion, with its imported atmosphere of vanished Bourbons and their reckless nobles, exorcised the memory of grimy London, and was a poem in itself. Even in imagination he always saw her drifting about the lovely bright rooms with her eyes full of dreams. She treated him to a bewildering variety of moods, sometimes even chattering for a few moments quite like the old Mabel, only to melt insensibly into the dignified and stately girl he longed to exhibit to every court in Europe. Not only was he fully roused from the long lethargy of his youth and alive as he had fancied he might be at thirty, but the romantic cravings born during his extraordinary experience with Margarethe Styr were eager, hungry, almost satisfied. Only that wondrous period prosaically known as the honeymoon could perfect this poem of the prince and princess of fairy lore.

It never occurred to him to wonder if he could have loved Mabel Cutting had she been a poor girl and he forced to give up his diplomatic ambitions and support her, or if he had met her only in commonplace hotel sitting-rooms. The exquisite creature’s very wealth was a part of her romantic fascination. It furnished the halo. It created, as with a magic wand, the poetic setting for her aristocratic beauty and grace. It moved her aloof from those common mortals whose gilded cages were stuffed with unpaid bills. That his life with her was to be free of those vulgar cares which his temperament held in particular abhorrence, added to the ecstasy, to the belief that they two were of the elect, chosen to dwell upon a rarefied plane, to experience a superior and perennial happiness.

It was quite ten days before he remembered Margarethe Styr. Then he sat down at once to write to her of his engagement, that she might not hear of it first through the public channels; it was to be announced as soon as the invitations were engraved. He found this letter the most difficult he had ever attempted to write. Even as he took up his pen that something he still did not wish to define stirred in the deeps of his mind, whispered that he had committed an act of infidelity. Never until that moment had he realized how close and deep his intimacy with Styr had been. It was, as she herself had called it, a mental marriage. There was no doubt that in a sense he had given himself to her, that he had intended to keep her always and first in his life, that he had vaguely looked forward to some ultimate union with her. The possibility of falling in love with the girl possessing the requisite millions had never occurred to him. But Margarethe Styr had gone out of his life. There was no possible doubt on that point. He no longer felt the slightest need of her. Henceforth he should be absorbed in his young wife and in his career. Mabel would become one of the cleverest women in Europe and give him all the inspiration he needed in that future of which she even now talked with such enthusiasm and intelligence. Friendships with other women would be superfluous and imprudent. Styr belonged to the past, and while he should cherish her memory, she must be content to reign in memory alone.

He spent the entire morning groaning at his desk, but finally concocted a letter that he dared to send to Munich. Far too astute to indulge in rhapsodies, and at the same time too much in love to be dishonest, he hedged between an avowal and a denial of his affection for the great heiress whom he shortly was to have the honour of leading to the altar. But although it was a very creditable performance, that letter, he was all youth and love and fire when he wrote it, and his pen conducted more than one flash from his electrified being. A woman far less keen than Styr would hardly have been persuaded that he was reluctantly steering into matrimony through the golden gate, barely conscious of his partner in the sordid transaction.

XXXVIII ISOLDA FURIOSA

From the instant that Isolde raised herself slowly from the couch on the ship’s deck the great audience that Styr’s performances always called forth knew that some unusual influence was at work upon the impersonation. Not even in that first silent moment was there the reading of a princess whose tormented spirit had not permitted her to sleep since she had left her father’s shores. At once there was such an expression of fury, of murderous hate, in those immense pregnant eyes, such an aura of primal devastating force emanated from the strained body, the fixed features, that hardly a person in the house but stirred uncomfortably. This was no indignant princess weary with night-watches, whose wrongs would gradually set her brain on fire; here was the infuriated woman out of leash, a woman that might have been suckled by a tigress and forgotten what little she had ever known of civilization. “Brangäne” said afterward that she was afraid to approach her; and had not the audience focussed their attention wholly upon Styr, they might have noticed that the poor little mezzo sang off the key twice.

When Isolde—who had even lifted herself and shown her face sooner than was customary, had stared for long insupportable moments while the sailors sang the careless satirical words of their song, “Oh, Irish maid! My winsome Irish maid!”—sprang to her feet, crying, “What wight dares insult me?” her great voice seemed to ring through all Munich. “Brangäne, ho!” she shouted. “Where sail we?”

Brangäne articulated that bluish stripes were visible in the west, that the ship fast approached the land. When Isolde bore down upon her, demanding in a still more terrible voice, “What land?” neither she nor the audience ever knew whether or not she managed to warble, “Cornwall’s verdant strand,” for Styr, barely waiting for the line to finish, towered in the centre of the stage and shrieked in tones of loosed fury and prophecy, that not even the golden quality of her voice could soften:

“Nevermore! To-day nor to-morrow!”

Then the minion, having given the necessary cue, Isolde hurled forth, in tones which seemed to express the gnashing of teeth, her wild regret for those lost arts that would have enabled her to annihilate the earth and every hated mortal on it. Discarding the cultivated gestures with which she so subtly suggested repressed power, growing passion, she tossed her arms aloft, and with eyes burning and face convulsed, declaimed in a voice that was strangely like a roar:

“Oh, subtle art of sorcery, awake in me once more power of will! Hark to my bidding, fluttering breezes! Arise and storm in boisterous strife! With furious rage and hurricane’s hurtle, awaken the sea from its calm! Rouse up the deep to its devilish deeds. Fling it the prey I gladly offer!”

The poverty of Wagner’s literary gift, apart from mere word jugglery, was never so manifest, nor his sublime faculty of imagining and delineating character in the terms of music; never had singer, not even Styr, rendered any words so unnecessary and sent the purport streaming out from her mind, her throat, with such terrific force. More than one in that spellbound audience half expected to see the roof of the opera house come down, at the very least to hear the noise of thunder above the orchestra. When she gasped: “Air! air! or my heart will choke! Open, open there wide!” the fine ladies in the _balkon_ felt for their smelling-salts. When Brangäne, having drawn aside the curtain, and Isolde, with a face that looked like death set in stone, commanded her to summon Tristan, that Germanic mass of flesh visibly trembled, and he asserted afterward that he had hardly dared to disobey her.

“Go! Order him! And _understand it_! I, Isolde, do command it!” The tones, growing rough and dark, expressed that the limits of endurance had been reached in a queen holding the power of life and death in her twitching hands, and it tried the courage of a mere actor to stand firmly at the helm.

By this time not one in the audience—outside of Italy the most musically receptive in the world, in spite of the sandwiches in their petticoat pockets and their unquenchable thirst—was sitting in a natural position. All were strained forward; all, with what power of thought was left in them, questioning whether the Styr were giving a new and sensational rendering of Isolde’s character, or if something had occurred to excite her beyond bounds and she were venting her anger in the sympathetic rôle. If so, what was it? Could she be in love with the tenor, she, the great Styr? And had he, the good devoted husband, trifled with and flouted her? But these speculations were barely formulated until later, when they were feverishly discussing the phenomenon; all were held, thrilled, half fearing that something real and terrible was about to happen before their eyes, vaguely apprehensive that never again would a stage performance satisfy their deep and persistent craving for vicarious emotions.

When Isolde rushed to the back of the pavilion and flung herself against the curtain to shriek out her curses, she almost swept Brangäne into the wings, and left but little enthusiasm in that now terrified artist to “throw herself upon Isolde with impetuous tenderness,” to ejaculate admiration and consolation. She, at least, knew that Styr was not deliberately giving an intensified rendering of the great rôle, but was in a mood to kill somebody. She shivered for her neck; those long working fingers looked like flexible steel.

“Curse him, the villain! Curses on his head! Vengeance! Death! Death for both of us!” Styr might have been setting free the pent-up demons in the hearts of all the women, good and bad, on the surface of the globe, and perchance those in the audience that had no such blessed means of relief gave a deep unconscious sigh of satisfaction.

When she gloated over the phial containing the death potion, Brangäne’s apprehensions were not quelled until she had informed herself that it was really empty, for by this time she was convinced that there was a feud to the death between the _hochdramatische_ and the tenor—tremblingly awaiting his cue without.