Part 6

“My husband is so ill (this, of course, is a profound secret) that I have persuaded him to go to his estate in Hungary and die in peace. Not that he has the least idea he must die, poor old dear; we call it resting for a time. As you may fancy, dear Mr. Ordham, I have few regrets in leaving a city whose insults and slights I have been forced to endure for fifteen years—I was married on my sixteenth birthday” (Ordham had looked her up also in the _Graf Buch_), “and now—well—”

He drew a long breath and clenched his hands. She continued:

“I felt that I _must_ see you before I left. I telegraphed because I felt sure that you had ceased to open my notes—”

“Oh! How can you say such a thing?”

“You were quite right. I have done the same thing myself. But many, many times! When a woman of my age makes a fool of herself, she does not deserve half the consideration which you have shown to me. Seven years may be very few as time goes, but they are an eternity when a woman commits the folly of loving a man younger than herself—”

“Oh! How can you say such things? How can you—” Ordham, who had been prepared for worse, felt as if his brain were being flicked with red-hot whips. He sprang to his feet and strode up and down the room, longing to tear his hair, to bolt from the house. Frau von Wass continued:

“Allow me to see myself as I should see another woman in the same circumstances. And while it has not been a happy experience, it has been salutary. Of course, I knew, when you turned as sulky as Adonis and as polite as an unfaithful husband, that it was all over. But—being a woman—”

“I am so sorry!”

“You say that in precisely the same tone when you forget an appointment or are late for dinner.” She spoke with soft humour. “But I did not send for you to reproach you, but for two reasons: to express my regret that I was so short-sighted as to sacrifice friendship to love, and to ask you to renew the first delightful relationship during the short time I shall remain in Munich.”

“Why not?” he asked eagerly, in his immense relief. He had found her wholly charming during their earlier acquaintance; and was quite willing to obliterate the entr’acte, were only she. He took a straight chair opposite her, and did not even look at the little white hands lying so helplessly on the black velvet lap. He shrank from her, and she guessed this, and for the moment was filled with such a rage of hatred that she would have stuck a knife into him had one been at hand. As it was she dropped her eyelashes, and permitted her red lips to quiver. Then she looked him full in the face and said quietly:

“It is too kind of you to believe that you can stand me for a fortnight longer. You are safe. You gave me a blow on the heart that has paralyzed it—no! do not get up again. I am not reproaching you, merely stating the case, quite dispassionately, as you can see. Love is a sealed book to me from this time forth, and, far from feeling reproachful,—ah! dear Mr. Ordham,—I am grateful. Just so often as a woman loves does she die. She comes to life again in the course of time, but with less and less of energy, illusion, her original power to love and be happy. I sometimes think that love is a congestion of a spot in the brain round the image of the man, which stares at her waking and sleeping, never to be banished from the tortured consciousness till Time has drained the blood from that little spot. And then it withers! And the best man on earth could never give life to that dead spot again. I am telling all this to your curious analytical mind, knowing of old how such things interest you, and being quite beyond all sensation myself. Now,” she concluded, rising like royalty and holding out her hand, which he took limply, “I shall let you go—how cold your hand is!”

“I am congealed! You have made me utterly miserable.”

“Not utterly, but a little. You deserve that much. Poor boy!” Her accent was that of the indulgent woman of the world. “Your education has begun too early. Nature did you an ill turn in giving you a brain and a charm out of all proportion to your years. You ought to be amusing yourself with nice English girls” (she knew that he hated English girls), “not playing up to a lot of European flirts a dozen years older than yourself. Be thankful that you fell into my hands. You are now as free as air once more—only—you will come here often this last fortnight?”

“Of course.” He shook hands with her once more and escaped from the house. As he opened the gate, absorbed in his miserable reflections, and quite unaware of his white dejected face, he did not notice a carriage that passed, nor that the occupant leaned forward suddenly; but a moment later he vaguely recognized the brougham and liveries of Countess Tann.

Within the magnificent Empire salon, which had tempted more than one member of the royal family, upon whom restrictions as to quarterings did not sit as heavily as upon the anointed, Hélène Wass sat with clenched hands and contorted face. She had fought down her passion at the risk of a fainting fit, but, well as she thought she knew herself, she had not guessed how difficult it would be, hardly what proportions her passion had assumed. She had not had the faintest intention of leaving Munich; her object had been to disarm her episodical lover, as cold and restive as a young girl, and with other methods and other arts win him again. Failing that, she would indulge in the doubtful joy of his mere friendship. But now she discarded not only the last alternative, but the waiting policy.

One of Ordham’s charms for this blasée woman of plebeian origin was the atmosphere of intellectual remoteness in which he seemed to dwell, and which, combined with his dignity and fine manners, made him the most finished type of the traditional aristocrat she had ever met. It was when she realized that she might never penetrate those outer envelopes of gayety and candour with which he concealed the intense reserve of his nature, that she had fallen genuinely in love with him; and the love of a woman of that sort is far more dangerous than her mere passion.

To-day, as he had sat in his straight chair, with his hands resting lightly, yet with a suggestion of weight, on his lap, completely at his ease in spite of his distress, his watchful brain throwing an almost visible shadow over his youth, she had become violently conscious that to possess this man wholly she would see the earth crumble under her feet. It was the first time in her life that she had considered sacrificing the world for any man. Whether she loved Ordham more than she had ever loved before, she could not be sure, for when a woman has loved many times memory is the last thing she cultivates; but love, heretofore, had not demanded sacrifice as a part of its programme. Nor had she ever felt quite so sick of Munich, its passive impregnability, the eternal weary round of official dinners she was forced, as the wife of a Geheimrath, to give and attend; the husband, whom she had expected, when she married him, to leave her a young widow, had never seemed so hopelessly hale, the future had never looked so short.

She tore and gnawed her handkerchief until her gown was strewn with lint, but her brain worked clearly. Only a brief while of self-control and she felt positive that she could reawaken his interest. Then she would force him to compromise her in such a manner that he could not desert her when she fled from Munich. Six months at her villa in Italy, and then a quiet wedding; and in addition to owning the unfortunate youth, body and soul, she should enjoy a fair prospect of blinding the world to her indiscretion with the coronet of Bridgminster. So far, she had had no occasion to appeal to the young Englishman’s honour or chivalry, but let her be able to demonstrate to him that, through the mighty passion he had awakened, her life was in ruins, and he would marry her beyond the shadow of a doubt. The opposition of his family would merely crystallize that obstinacy that showed its grim face now and again amidst the vacillations of a character still immature. To the young man’s ruined career and maimed life, to his possibly broken heart, she gave not a thought; or had she, it would have made no difference in her plans. There is no adventuress so utterly unscrupulous as the society cocotte, with her demands so much more complicated than those of the women of commerce, particularly when her sated senses are electrified for the last time. Hélène Wass knew that she should never love again, and for love and the pleasure of spending money she had lived since the convent doors had closed behind her. Money of her own she now had in abundance, for her father had speculated rationally during the later years of his life and had left her, his sole heir, a considerable fortune. Once her lips gave a satirical twist as the question obtruded itself: should she have had the courage to sacrifice all for love on a younger son’s meagre income? Then she felt something like a pang of gratitude that there was no obstacle to her headlong abandonment to a passion, which, whatever suffering and mortification it entailed, gave her back her youth, awoke once more in her weary brain the power to dream, to vizualize a future. Years before, it seemed to her, as she sat there and heard the heavy feet of her old husband in the hall, she had resigned herself to the interminable blankness of the present.

VII THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS

Ordham was unstrung and miserable for quite twelve hours. He went that night to a rout at one of the embassies, and, dully alive to the paltriness of life in general, and the absurdities of small courts in particular, he pushed past a group of astonished royalties with as little ceremony as had they been hucksters and the occasion Lord Mayor’s Day in London. He managed to avoid speaking to every one he knew; but at the end of an hour, realizing that he could no longer ignore Princess Nachmeister or Frau von Wass, he left the house. In no mood for the student cafés, with their careless gayety, their atmosphere so dense with smoke that the clusters of caps on the “trees” were mere blurs of colour, he strolled into Maximilia, a restaurant fashionable during the day and early evening on account of its exceptional cooking, but rather more interesting toward midnight and after. There was little night life in Munich, outside of the student haunts, but Maximilia was a favourite resort with the young bloods that had seen enough of other capitals to scorn the bourgeois hours of the true Münchener. Occasionally there was a dashing stranger to ogle, but few ladies of the lower ten thousand found Munich worthy of their enterprise. The pretty waitresses, actresses, chorus girls, then, as now, had each her patron, for even the young Bavarian officer is of a domestic turn; and the floating tribe received such cursory attention that they had been known to cut short their visits with anathema. But the officers often brought their gaudy young friends to Maximilia after twelve, and it amused Ordham, interested in every phase of life, to sit and watch this honest German attempt to feel as sophisticated as the Parisian.

And only in Munich, perhaps, a city too artistic to have a moral left, would army officers and their almost respectable partners rub elbows, in the best restaurant in the town, with painted young men come on the same quest as the floating female. There were three of these young men here to-night, all members of noble families, who had neither the energy nor the ambition in their worn-out blood to cross the ocean and seek to replenish their equally exhausted coffers in the manly avocations of waiter and riding master. Ordham usually watched them with a mild contempt, for they were of his class and he felt sorry for them. But to-night, as he saw the head of one of the oldest and most distinguished houses in Europe, a young man with something of Apollo in his slender grace, and a face of perfect beauty, despite its signal-flag of paint, enter, seat himself, and cast about the room a slow, anxious, appraising glance, Ordham, depressed as he already was, felt the very walls of his soul shudder. How much better fitted was he to cope with the grim problem of mere existence than these unfortunates? He had a fine physique, but his indolent habits, long indulged, had made nearly every form of exertion distasteful to him. Individual as he was, he yet belonged to that strictly modern type of English aristocrat impatiently dubbed “literary” by those that shoot and ride and eat and drink in the good old fashion of their ancestors. These intellectual young scions, without any peculiar talent or the obligations of poverty, too modest or too indolent to dream of enriching the arts they love, give themselves up more and more to the refined pleasures and sensibilities of the intellect, less and less to the pursuits that keep the blood swift and red in the veins. With many this attitude begins in affectation, even though as often it develops into something like a vocation; but in the case of Ordham the subtler chords of Life’s big orchestra, forever inaudible to the swarm, had allured him since he could remember. If there was one reason more than another why Lord Bridgminster disliked and disapproved of his heir presumptive, it was because of Ordham’s candid aversion from “long tiresome meaningless days behind a gun,” “tearing across country at the tail of a frantic fox,” “wolfing food that would have stupefied the brain of a day labourer.” But if the life he led was set to the tune of his temperament, he was forced to admit that he paid toll in the depletion of his physical vigours, for at this age, at all events, he should have been developing his muscles and enriching his blood in the open air.

To-night he felt more tired than usual, and as he stared blankly at the young nobleman to whom the centuries had given beauty and breeding in their highest perfection, and a sufficient amount of brain to make him something of a social star in every capital he visited, Ordham was driven to review his own resources. His income was inadequate for his mere needs, much less for his tastes, and some unthinkable reverse of fortune might deprive him of it altogether. Upon what, then, could he rely, not only to supply his material wants, but those others, which, never having been hungry, he believed to be far more indispensable were life to be tolerated at all. He was a lover of all the arts and a pupil of none. His reading was wide, he was fastidious in his manner of expressing himself; but what his fellow-students had learned out of books or in lecture rooms he had but the vaguest idea. The mere thought of roughing it in any of the colonies was as repugnant as of marrying a rich woman devoid of charm. “The City,” into which he knew that many of his kind disappeared, he visualized as a maelstrom of high hats and office stools without backs. He had an aristocratic distaste for business, not out of snobbery, of which he was innocent, but because of a belief, both hazy and firm, that it commanded the development of the meaner faculties, that only the cynically dishonest emerged from the gorged arena with fortune in their disfigured hands. To-night, however, he recalled, what he had practically forgotten, that the moneyed foundations of the house of Ordham had been laid anew but four generations since by the desperate heir of the ancient but impoverished family: he had built a textile factory on one end of his Yorkshire property. This enterprise prospering, he had built another, and another, until he was enabled to buy back twenty thousand of the acres confiscated during the Civil Wars, restore Ordham Castle, unroofed and sacked by Cromwell, and furnish it with all the horrors in horsehair, rep, mahogany, and meaningless bronze which preceded the crusade of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He then found leisure to occupy his seat in the House of Lords, developed other useful talents, and was raised from the barony of Ordham to the earldom of Bridgminster. Since then there had always been an Ordham in Parliament, but the majority of the family were given over to the enjoyment of sport, and were noted mainly for their selection of beautiful wives and handsome husbands, rarely unendowed with the minor blessings of wealth and race. They had forgotten the origin of the factories still flourishing on the Yorkshire estate, but now far removed from covers and fields; to-night, however, Ordham, facing the contingency of Bridgminster’s marriage, or his own failure to fall in love with a girl whose riches would be a fair exchange for the position he could give her, bitterly envied his wise and possibly unscrupulous ancestor, and would have welcomed similar outcroppings in his own brain.

Or suppose he married for mere love, a folly to which all young men were liable, and, upon his ridiculous income, found himself with a family upon his hands? This, however, he felt to be such a violent strain upon his imagination that he dismissed it, but found no consolation in the prospect of keeping up appearances, much less enjoying life, on a diminishing credit. He was too young, and too accustomed to see the creases of life magically smoothed, to remain dispirited for long, no matter what the combining causes; but during this hour he sat plunged in a melancholy so profound that for years after its bare memory appalled him.

There is a fine line between hypercivilization and degeneracy, too fine to be a barrier for unwary feet: but the natural nobility and refinement of Ordham’s mind, combined with its higher activities and poise, had brought him up short. No matter what his straits, even with his somewhat cynical attitude that all forms of vice were too inevitable to bother about, he was incapable of falling to the horrid level of these young continental nobles. But of what else might he not be capable? As his imagination, morbidly active, pictured him hopelessly involved, without a plank to grasp at, he suddenly swore an oath that he would never go under, no, not if he sacrificed all belonging to him, and every canon that society had invented for her own defence and deluded man into believing was handed down from on high. Ordham, fastidiously bred, and reared above the temptations that men of lower degree must reckon with in their daily struggle, was one of the most finished results of those same immemorial laws; but in this sudden vision of the horrors of poverty, of the terrors and temptations of life, they fell to ashes, and left him part savage, partly as cool, cynical, and unscrupulous, as only the supercivilized can be. He would never go under, never come down one step from the high position to which he had been born. If wishes could have slain Lord Bridgminster, he would have died that night in his Spartan bed. Ordham suddenly wondered if he were capable of killing his brother. He glanced about the restaurant once more, his gaze lingering on the gloomy face of the last of the line that had been illustrious in the history of Europe since it had emerged from the yoke of the Huns. He set his teeth and swore that he could, and without a scruple or a regret. He would never go under, never, never, never. But it was a solution by no means to his taste, and he left the restaurant abruptly and went for a walk of unaccustomed activity in the Englischergarten. When he reached his bed in the small hours his equilibrium was restored, and he reflected with amazement and horror upon the vitalities that had flourished unsuspected in the depths of his being. But his ego was somewhat excited and fascinated at the discovery, and he fell asleep wishing that he could talk it all over with Margarethe Styr.

VIII PURPLE LILIES AND BITTER FRUIT

That night Styr sang _Isolde_. On the morning following, Ordham sent her a box of purple lilies. He expected no acknowledgment, for he knew that she ignored all offerings; but in the course of the afternoon he received a note which banished evil memories, including his struggles with Fräulein Lutz.

“DEAR MR. ORDHAM: I feel Isolde herself with these purple lilies in my hands. She was a great woman and no other colour is worthy of her. I have half promised to sing at Princess Nachmeister’s concert to-morrow night, and now I have a fancy to cover myself with these lilies and sing the _Liebestod_. One needs inspiration of an uncommon sort when, unsupported by orchestra and footlights, one feels as if one might founder any moment in a sea of impertinent eyes. Your eyes, at least, are kind and encouraging. I will sing to you—for once—in memory of a picturesque hour designed by a king, and one of that unhappy monarch’s rare triumphs.

“Thank you so much!

“MARGARETHE TANN.”

This note so flattered and delighted him that he went voluntarily to call on Frau von Wass, and further beatified by finding her surrounded, made himself so charming to her guests that although, in spite of a murmured invitation, he would not linger, Hélène was tempted to believe that he kindled alone in the light of her smiles.

But he had no intention of bestowing a thought upon her except when circumstances forced him into her society. She had craved no more than her due, and for a fortnight longer she should have the benefit of all the courtesy he could summon, but not a shadow of superfluous attention. Little dreaming of what was pickling for him, he had already consigned her to the past, and the only wish she inspired was the expiration of the fortnight. He was too indifferent constitutionally to speculate upon her sudden change of front, and too inexperienced, despite his cleverness, to be the match of any adventuress who wore the habit of his own world. With those profound and haunted abysses of wicked women he had had as little contact as with that practical side of life which tapers the wits and sharpens the vision. Ten years hence and the Hélène Wasses would be read and disposed of in short order; to-day he was but the good-natured, honourable, gullible young English aristocrat, who has been taken in time out of mind, and will continue to be until England is Americanized.

On the following evening he took his chair in the concert room of the Nachmeister Palast with an inner ferment so successfully concealed that his face was quite expressionless. For once he did not smile into every pair of eyes turned upon him. He thought of little but the note of Margarethe Styr, which he had read several times. Whatever her motive, he knew that a great compliment had been paid him; and although a too kindly fate disposed him to take most compliments as a matter of course, and humility disturbed him at rare intervals, to-night he was inclined to be not only exultant but grateful.

The immense room, with its old crimson brocades, its heavy dingy rococo gilding, its cosmopolitan assemblage, was an imposing sight, and Ordham was still young enough to love society. Parties at Excellenz Nachmeister’s were seldom dowdy (unless too many royalties were present), and when, as to-night, the entire diplomatic corps was bidden, as well as many army officers and high officials, the men, in their beautiful uniforms, their orders and sashes, made an even more dazzling impression than the women. Uniforms at least were always new, and gowns did duty in aristocratic Munich for many seasons, regardless of changes in style. Waists too were large, and square, and soft; but the materials that covered them, whether old or new, were very rich, and jewels conceal many defects. A few besides Hélène Wass could be relied upon to display the fashions of Paris, and the women of the diplomatic corps were always resplendent.