During the weeks that followed the
Meadowses’ first visit to Crosby Ledgers, Doris’s
conscience was by no means asleep on the subject of
Lady Dunstable. She felt that her behaviour in
that lady’s house, and the sudden growth in
her own mind of a quite unmanageable dislike, were
not to be defended in one who prided herself on a general
temper of coolness and common sense, who despised
the rancour and whims of other women, hated scenes,
and had always held jealousy to be the smallest and
most degrading of passions. Why not laugh at what
was odious, show oneself superior to personal slights,
and enjoy what could be enjoyed? And above all,
why grudge Arthur a woman friend?
None of these arguments, however,
availed at all to reconcile Doris to the new intimacy
growing under her eyes. The Dunstables came to
town, and invitations followed. Mr. and Mrs.
Meadows were asked to a large dinner-party, and Doris
held her peace and went. She found herself at
the end of a long table with an inarticulate schoolboy
of seventeen, a ward of Lord Dunstable’s, on
her left, and with an elderly colonel on her right,
who, after a little cool examination of her through
an eyeglass, decided to devote himself to the debutante
on his other side, a Lady Rosamond, who was ready
to chatter hunting and horses to him through the whole
of dinner. The girl was not pretty, but she was
fresh and gay, and Doris, tired with “much serving,”
envied her spirits, her evident assumption that the
world only existed for her to laugh and ride in, her
childish unspoken claim to the best of everything clothes,
food, amusements, lovers. Doris on her side made
valiant efforts with the schoolboy. She liked
boys, and prided herself on getting on with them.
But this specimen had no conversation at
any rate for the female sex and apparently
only an appetite. He ate steadily through the
dinner, and seemed rather to resent Doris’s
attempts to distract him from the task. So that
presently Doris found herself reduced to long tracts
of silence, when her fan was her only companion, and
the watching of other people her only amusement.
Lord and Lady Dunstable faced each
other at the sides of the table, which was purposely
narrow, so that talk could pass across it. Lady
Dunstable sat between an Ambassador and a Cabinet Minister,
but Meadows was almost directly opposite to her, and
it seemed to be her chief business to make him the
hero of the occasion. It was she who drew him
into political or literary discussion with the Cabinet
Minister, so that the neighbours of each stayed their
own talk to listen; she who would insist on his repeating
“that story you told me at Crosby Ledgers;”
who attacked him abruptly rudely even,
as she had done in the country so that
he might defend himself; and when he had slipped into
all her traps one after the other, would fall back
in her chair with a little satisfied smile. Doris,
silent and forgotten, could not keep her eyes for
long from the two distant figures from this
new Arthur, and the sallow-faced, dark-eyed witch
who had waved her wand over him.
Wasn’t she glad to see
her husband courted valued as he deserved borne
along the growing stream of fame? What matter,
if she could only watch him from the bank? and
if the impetuous stream were carrying him away from
her? No! She wasn’t glad. Some
cold and deadly thing seemed to be twining about her
heart. Were they leaving the dear, poverty-stricken,
debt-pestered life behind for ever, in which, after
all, they had been so happy: she, everything to
Arthur, and he, so dependent upon her? No doubt
she had been driven to despair, often, by his careless,
shiftless ways; she had thirsted for success and money;
just money enough, at least, to get along with.
And now success had come, and money was coming.
And here she was, longing for the old, hard, struggling
past hating the advent of the new and glittering
future. As she sat at Lady Dunstable’s
table, she seemed to see the little room in their
Kensington house, with the big hole in the carpet,
the piles of papers and books, the reading-lamp that
would smoke, her work-basket, the house-books, Arthur
pulling contentedly at his pipe, the fire crackling
between them, his shabby coat, her shabby dress Bliss! compared
to this splendid scene, with the great Vandycks looking
down on the dinner-table, the crowd of guests and servants,
the costly food, the dresses, and the diamonds with,
in the distance, her Arthur, divided, as it
seemed, from her by a growing chasm, never remembering
to throw her a look or a smile, drinking in a tide
of flattery he would once have been the first to scorn,
captured, exhibited, befooled by an unscrupulous,
egotistical woman, who would drop him like a squeezed
orange when he had ceased to amuse her. And the
worst of it was that the woman was not a mere pretender!
She had a fine, hard brain, “as good
as Arthur’s nearly and
he knows it. It is that which attracts him and
excites him. I can mend his socks; I can listen
while he reads; and he used to like it when I praised.
Now, what I say will never matter to him any more;
that was just sentiment and nonsense; now, he only
wants to know what she says; that’s
business! He writes with her in his mind and
when he has finished something he sends it off to
her, straight. I may see it when all the world
may but she has the first-fruits!”
And in poor Doris’s troubled
mind the whole scene save the two central
figures, Lady Dunstable and Arthur seemed
to melt away. She was not the first wife, by
a long way, into whose quiet breast Lady Dunstable
had dropped these seeds of discord. She knew
it well by report; but it was hateful, both to wifely
feeling and natural vanity, that she should
now be the victim of the moment, and should know no
more than her predecessors how to defend herself.
“Why can’t I be cool and cutting pay
her back when she is rude, and contradict her when
she’s absurd? She is absurd often.
But I think of the right things to say just five minutes
too late. I have no nerve that’s
the point! only l’esprit d’escalier
to perfection. And she has been trained to this
sort of campaigning from her babyhood. No good
growling! I shall never hold my own!”
Then, into this despairing mood there
dropped suddenly a fragment of her neighbour, the
Colonel’s, conversation “Mrs.
So-and-so? Impossible woman! Oh, one doesn’t
mind seeing her graze occasionally at the other end
of one’s table as the price of getting
her husband, don’t you know? but ”
Doris’s sudden laugh at the
Colonel’s elbow startled that gentleman so that
he turned round to look at her. But she was absorbed
in the menu, which she had taken up, and he could
only suppose that something in it amused her.
A few days later arrived a letter
for Meadows, which he handed to his wife in silence.
There had been no further discussion of Lady Dunstable
between them; only a general sense of friction, warnings
of hidden fire on Doris’s side, and resentment
on his, quite new in their relation to each other.
Meadows clearly thought that his wife was behaving
very badly. Lady Dunstable’s efforts on
his behalf had already done him substantial service;
she had introduced him to all kinds of people likely
to help him, intellectually and financially; and to
help him was to help Doris. Why would she be
such a little fool? So unlike her, too! sensible,
level-headed creature that she generally was.
But he was afraid of losing his own temper, if he
argued with her. And indeed his lazy easy-goingness
loathed argument of this domestic sort, loathed scenes,
loathed doing anything disagreeable that could be put
off.
But here was Lady Dunstable’s letter:
Dear Mr. Arthur, Will your
wife forgive me if I ask you to come to a tiny
men’s dinner-party next Friday at 8.15 to
meet the President of the Duma, and another Russian,
an intimate friend of Tolstoy’s? All
males, but myself! So I hope Mrs. Meadows will
let you come.
Yours
sincerely,
RACHEL
DUNSTABLE.
“Of course, I won’t go
if you don’t like it, Doris,” said Meadows
with the smile of magnanimity.
“I thought you were angry with
me once for even suggesting that
you might!” Doris’s tone was light, but
not pleasing to a husband’s ears. She was
busy at the moment in packing up the American proofs
of the Disraeli lecture, which at last with infinite
difficulty she had persuaded Meadows to correct and
return.
“Well but of course this
is exceptional!” said Meadows, pacing up and
down irresolutely.
“Everything’s exceptional in
that quarter,” said Doris, in the same tone.
“Oh, go, of course! it would be a
thousand pities not to go.”
Meadows at once took her at her word.
That was the first of a series of “male”
dinners, to which, however, it seemed to Doris, if
one might judge from Arthur’s accounts, that
a good many female exceptions were admitted, no doubt
by way of proving the rule. And during July, Meadows
lunched in town in the lofty regions of
St. James’s or Mayfair with other
enthusiastic women admirers, most of them endowed with
long purses and long pedigrees, at least
three or four times a week. Doris was occasionally
asked and sometimes went. But she was suffering
all the time from an initial discouragement and depression,
which took away self-reliance, and left her awkwardly
conscious. She struggled, but in vain. The
world into which Arthur was being so suddenly swept
was strange to her, and in many ways antipathetic;
but had she been happy and in spirits she could have
grappled with it, or rather she could have lost herself
in Arthur’s success. Had she not always
been his slave? But she was not happy! In
their obscure days she had been Arthur’s best
friend, as well as his wife. And it was the old
comradeship which was failing her; encroached upon,
filched from her, by other women; and especially by
this exacting, absorbing woman, whose craze for Arthur
Meadows’s society was rapidly becoming an amusement
and a scandal even to those well acquainted with her
previous records of the same sort.
The end of July arrived. The
Dunstables left town. At a concert, for which
she had herself sent them tickets, Lady Dunstable met
Doris and her husband, the night before she departed.
“In ten days we shall expect
you at Pitlochry,” she said, smiling, to Arthur
Meadows, as she swept past them in the corridor.
Then, pausing, she held out a perfunctory hand to
Doris.
“And we really can’t persuade you to come
too?”
The tone was careless and patronising.
It brought the sudden red to Doris’s cheek.
For one moment she was tempted to say “Thank
you since you are so kind after
all, why not?” just that she might
see the change in those large, malicious eyes might
catch their owner unawares, for once. But, as
usual, nerve failed her. She merely said that
her drawing would keep her all August in town; and
that London, empty, was the best possible place for
work. Lady Dunstable nodded and passed on.
The ten days flew. Meadows, kept
to it by Doris, was very busy preparing another lecture
for publication in an English review. Doris, meanwhile,
got his clothes ready, and affected a uniformly cheerful
and indifferent demeanour. On Arthur’s
last evening at home, however, he came suddenly into
the sitting-room, where Doris was sewing on some final
buttons, and after fidgeting about a little, with
occasional glances at his wife, he said abruptly:
“I say, Doris, I won’t
go if you’re going to take it like this.”
She turned upon him.
“Like what?”
“Oh, don’t pretend!”
was the impatient reply. “You know very
well that you hate my going to Scotland!”
Doris, all on edge, and smarting under
the too Jovian look and frown with which he surveyed
her from the hearthrug, declared that, as it was not
a case of her going to Scotland, but of his, she was
entirely indifferent. If he enjoyed it, he was
quite right to go. She was going to enjoy her
work in Uncle Charles’s studio.
Meadows broke out into an angry attack
on her folly and unkindness. But the more he
lost his temper, the more provokingly Doris kept hers.
She sat there, surrounded by his socks and shirts,
a trim, determined little figure declining
to admit that she was angry, or jealous, or offended,
or anything of the kind. Would he please come
upstairs and give her his last directions about his
packing? She thought she had put everything ready;
but there were just a few things she was doubtful about.
And all the time she seemed to be
watching another Doris a creature quite
different from her real self. What had come over
her? If anybody had told her beforehand that
she could ever let slip her power over her own will
like this, ever become possessed with this silent,
obstinate demon of wounded love and pride, never would
she have believed them! She moved under its grip
like an automaton. She would not quarrel with
Arthur. But as no soft confession was possible,
and no mending or undoing of what had happened, to
laugh her way through the difficult hours was all
that remained. So that whenever Meadows renewed
the attempt to “have it out,” he was met
by renewed evasion and “chaff” on Doris’s
side, till he could only retreat with as much offended
dignity as she allowed him.
It was after midnight before she had
finished his packing. Then, bidding him a smiling
good night, she fell asleep apparently as
soon as her head touched the pillow.
The next morning, early, she stood
on the steps waving farewell to Arthur, without a
trace of ill-humour. And he, though vaguely uncomfortable,
had submitted at last to what he felt was her fixed
purpose of avoiding a scene. Moreover, the “eternal
child” in him, which made both his charm and
his weakness, had already scattered his compunctions
of the preceding day, and was now aglow with the sheer
joy of holiday and change. He had worked very
hard, he had had a great success, and now he was going
to live for three weeks in the lap of luxury; intellectual
luxury first and foremost good talk, good
company, an abundance of books for rainy days; but
with the addition of a supreme chef, Lord Dunstable’s
champagne, and all the amenities of one of the best
moors in Scotland.
Doris went back into the house, and,
Arthur being no longer in the neighbourhood, allowed
herself a few tears. She had never felt so lonely
in her life, nor so humiliated. “My moral
character is gone,” she said to herself.
“I have no moral character. I thought I
was a sensible, educated woman; and I am just an ‘’Arriet,’
in a temper with her ‘’Arry.’
Well courage! Three weeks isn’t
long. Who can say that Arthur mayn’t come
back disillusioned? Rachel Dunstable is a born
tyrant. If, instead of flattering him, she begins
to bully him, strange things may happen!”
The first week of solitude she spent
in household drudgery. Bills had to be paid,
and there was now mercifully a little money to pay
them with. Though it was August, the house was
to be “spring-cleaned,” and Doris had
made a compact with her sulky maids that when it began
she would do no more than sleep and breakfast at home.
She would spend her days in the Campden Hill studio,
and sup on a tray anywhere. On these
terms, they grudgingly allowed her to occupy her own
house.
The studio in which she worked was
on the top of Campden Hill, and opened into one of
the pleasant gardens of that neighbourhood. Her
uncle, Charles Bentley, an elderly Academician, with
an ugly, humorous face, red hair, red eyebrows, a
black skull-cap, and a general weakness for the female
sex, was very fond of his niece Doris, and inclined
to think her a neglected and underrated wife.
He was too fond of his own comfort, however, to let
Meadows perceive this opinion of his; still less did
he dare express it to Doris. All he could do was
to befriend her and make her welcome at the studio,
to advise her about her illustrations, and correct
her drawing when it needed it. He himself was
an old-fashioned artist, quite content to be “mid”
or even “early” Victorian. He still
cultivated the art of historical painting, and was
still as anxious as any contemporary of Frith to tell
a story. And as his manner was no less behind
the age than his material, his pictures remained on
his hands, while the “vicious horrors,”
as they seemed to him, of the younger school held
the field and captured the newspapers. But as
he had some private means, and no kith or kin but his
niece, the indifference of the public to his work
caused him little disturbance. He pleased his
own taste, allowing himself a good-natured contempt
for the work which supplanted him, coupled with an
ever-generous hand for any post-Impressionist in difficulties.
On the August afternoon when Doris,
escaping at last from her maids and her accounts,
made her way up to the studio, for some hours’
work on the last three or four illustrations wanted
for a Christmas book, Uncle Charles welcomed her with
effusion.
“Where have you been, child,
all this time? I thought you must have flitted
entirely.”
Doris explained while she
set up her easel that for the first time
in their lives she and Arthur had been seeing something
of the great world, and mildly “doing”
the season. Arthur was now continuing the season
in Scotland, while she had stayed at home to work
and rest. Throughout her talk, she avoided mentioning
the Dunstables.
“H’m!” said Uncle Charles, “so
you’ve been junketing!”
Doris admitted it.
“Did you like it?”
Doris put on her candid look.
“I daresay I should have liked
it, if I’d made a success of it. Of course
Arthur did.”
“Too much trouble!” said
the old painter, shaking his head. “I was
in the swim, as they call it, for a year or two.
I might have stayed there, I suppose, for I could
always tell a story, and I wasn’t afraid of the
big-wigs. But I couldn’t stand it.
Dress-clothes are the deuce! And besides, talk
now is not what it used to be. The clever men
who can say smart things are too clever to say them.
Nobody wants ’em! So let’s ‘cultivate
our garden,’ my dear, and be thankful. I’m
beginning a new picture and I’ve
found a topping new model. What can a man want
more? Very nice of you to let Arthur go, and
have his head. Where is it? some smart
moor? He’ll soon be tired of it.”
Doris laughed, let the question as
to the “smart moor” pass, and came round
to look at the new subject that Uncle Charles was laying
in. He explained it to her, well knowing that
he spoke to unsympathetic ears, for whatever Doris
might draw for her publishers, she was a passionate
and humble follower of those modern experimentalists
who have made the Slade School famous. The subject
was, it seemed, to be a visit paid to Joanna the mad
and widowed mother of Charles V., at Tordesillas, by
the envoys of Henry VII., who were thus allowed by
Ferdinand, the Queen’s father, to convince themselves
that the Queen’s profound melancholia formed
an insuperable barrier to the marriage proposals of
the English King. The figure of the distracted
Queen, crouching in white beside a window from which
she could see the tomb of her dead and adored husband,
the Archduke Philip, and some of the splendid figures
of the English embassy, were already sketched.
“I have been fit to hang myself
over her!” said Bentley, pointing to the Queen.
“I tried model after model. At last I’ve
got the very thing! She comes to-day for the
first time. You’ll see her! Before
she comes, I must scrape out Joanna, so as to look
at the thing quite fresh. But I daresay I shall
only make a few sketches of the lady to-day.”
“Who is she, and where did you get her!”
Bentley laughed. “You won’t
like her, my dear! Never mind. Her appearance
is magnificent whatever her mind and morals
may be.”
And he described how he had heard
of the lady from an artist friend who had originally
seen her at a music-hall, and had persuaded her to
come and sit to him. The comic haste and relief
with which he had now transferred her to Bentley lost
nothing in Bentley’s telling. Of course
she had “a fiend of a temper.” “Wish
you joy of her! Oh, don’t ask me about
her! You’ll find out for yourself.”
“I can manage her,” said Uncle Charles
tranquilly. “I’ve had so many of ’em.”
“She is Spanish?”
“Not at all. She is Italian.
That is to say, her mother was a Neapolitan, the daughter
of a jeweller in Hatton Garden, and her father an
English bank clerk. The Neapolitans have a lot
of Spanish blood in them hence, no doubt,
the physique.”
“And she is a professional model!”
“Nothing of the sort! though
she will probably become one. She is a writer Heaven
save the mark! and I have to pay her vast
sums to get her. It is the greatest favour.”
“A writer?”
“Poetess! and journalist!”
said Uncle Charles, enjoying Doris’s puzzled
look. “She sent me her poems yesterday.
As to journalism” his eyes twinkled “I
say nothing but this. Watch her hats!
She has the reputation in certain circles of
being the best-hatted woman in London. All this
I get from the man who handed her on to me. As
I said to him, it depends on what ‘London’
you mean.”
“Married?”
“Oh dear no, though of course
she calls herself ‘Madame’ like the rest
of them Madame Vavasour. I have reason,
however, to believe that her real name is Flink Elena
Flink. And I should say very much on
the look-out for a husband; and meanwhile very much
courted by boys who go to what she calls
her ‘evenings.’ It is odd, the taste
that some youths have for these elderly Circes.”
“Elderly?” said Doris,
busy the while with her own preparations. “I
was hoping for something young and beautiful!”
“Young? no! an
unmistakable thirty-five. Beautiful? Well,
wait till you see her ... H’m that
shoulder won’t do!” Doris had
just placed a preliminary sketch of one of her “subjects”
under his eyes “and that bit of perspective
in the corner wants a lot of seeing to. Look here!”
The old Academician, brought up in the spirit of Ingres “lé
dessin, c’est la probité! lé
dessin, c’est l’honneur!” fell
eagerly to work on the sketch, and Doris watched.
They were both absorbed, when there
was a knock at the door. Doris turned hastily,
expecting to see the model. Instead of which there
entered, in response to Bentley’s “Come
in!” a girl of four or five and twenty, in a
blue linen dress and a shady hat, who nodded a quiet
“Good afternoon” to the artist, and proceeded
at once with an air of business to a writing-table
at the further end of the studio, covered with papers.
“Miss Wigram,” said the
artist, raising his voice, “let me introduce
you to my niece, Mrs. Meadows.”
The girl rose from her chair again
and bowed. Then Doris saw that she had a charming
tired face, beautiful eyes on which she had just placed
spectacles, and soft brown hair framing her thin cheeks.
“A novelty since you were here,”
whispered Bentley in Doris’s ear. “She’s
an accountant capital girl! Since these
Liberal budgets came along, I can’t keep my
own accounts, or send in my own income-tax returns dash
them! So she does the whole business for me pays
everything sees to everything comes
once a week. We shall all be run by the women
soon!”
The studio had grown very quiet.
Through some glass doors open to the garden came in
little wandering winds which played with some loose
papers on the floor, and blew Doris’s hair about
her eyes as she stooped over her easel, absorbed in
her drawing. Apparently absorbed: her subliminal
mind, at least, was far away, wandering on a craggy
Scotch moor. A lady on a Scotch pony she
understood that Lady Dunstable often rode with the
shooters and a tall man walking beside her,
carrying, not a gun, but a walking stick: that
was the vision in the crystal. Arthur was too
bad a shot to be tolerated in the Dunstable circle;
had indeed wisely announced from the beginning that
he was not to be included among the guns. All
the more time for conversation, the give and take of
wits, the pleasures of the intellectual tilting-ground;
the whole watered by good wine, seasoned with the
best of cooking, and lapped in the general ease of
a house where nobody ever thought of such a vulgar
thing as money except to spend it.
Doris had in general a severe mind
as to the rich and aristocratic classes. Her
own hard and thrifty life had disposed her to see them
en noir. But the sudden rush of a certain
section of them to crowd Arthur’s lectures had
been certainly mollifying. If it had not been
for the Vampire, Doris was well aware that her standards
might have given way.
As it was, Lady Dunstable’s
exacting ways, her swoop, straight and fierce, on
the social morsel she desired, like that of an eagle
on the sheepfold, had made her, in Doris’s sore
consciousness, the representative of thousands more;
all greedy, able, domineering, inevitably getting
what they wanted, and more than they deserved; against
whom the starved and virtuous intellectuals of the
professional classes were bound to contend to the
death. The story of that poor girl, that clergyman’s
daughter, for instance could anything have
been more insolent more cruel? Doris
burned to avenge her.
Suddenly a great clatter
and noise in the passage leading from the small house
behind to the studio and garden.
“Here she is!”
Uncle Charles sprang up, and reached
the studio door just as a shower of knocks descended
upon it from outside. He opened it, and on the
threshold there stood two persons; a stout lady in
white, surmounted by a huge black hat with a hearse-like
array of plumes; and, behind her, a tall and willowy
youth, with so far as could be seen through
the chinks of the hat a large nose, fair
hair, pale blue eyes, and a singular deficiency of
chin. He carried in his arms a tiny black Spitz
with a pink ribbon round its neck.
The lady looked, frowning, into the
interior of the studio. She held in her hand
a very large fan, with the handle of which she had
been rapping the door; and the black feathers with
which she was canopied seemed to be nodding in her
eyes.
“Maestro, you are not alone!”
she said in a deep, reproachful voice.
“My niece, Mrs. Meadows Madame
Vavasour,” said Bentley, ushering in the new-comer.
Doris turned from her easel and bowed,
only to receive a rather scowling response.
“And your friend?” As
he spoke the artist looked blandly at the young man.
“I brought him to amuse me,
Maestro. When I am dull my countenance changes,
and you cannot do it justice. He will talk to
me I shall be animated and you
will profit.”
“Ah, no doubt!” said Bentley,
smiling. “And your friend’s name?”
“Herbert Dunstable Honourable
Herbert Dunstable! Signor Bentley,”
said Madame Vavasour, advancing with a stately step
into the room, and waving peremptorily to the young
man to follow.
Doris sat transfixed and staring.
Bentley turned to look at his niece, and their eyes
met his full of suppressed mirth. The
son! the unsatisfactory son! Doris
remembered that his name was Herbert. In the
train of this third-rate sorceress!
Her thoughts ran excitedly to the
distant moors, and that magnificent lady, with her
circle of distinguished persons, holiday-making statesmen,
peers, diplomats, writers, and the like. Here
was a humbler scene! But Doris’s fancy
at once divined a score of links between it and the
high comedy yonder.
Meanwhile, at the name of Dunstable,
the girl accountant in the distance had also moved
sharply, so as to look at the young man. But in
the bustle of Madame Vavasour’s entrance, and
her passage to the sitter’s chair, the girl’s
gesture passed unnoticed.
“I’m just worn out, Maestro!”
said the model languidly, uplifting a pair of tragic
eyes to the artist. “I sat up half the night
writing. I had a subject which tormented me.
But I have done something splendid! Isn’t
it splendid, Herbert?”
“Ripping!” said the young man, grinning
widely.
“Sit down!” said Madame,
with a change of tone. And the youth sat down,
on the very low chair to which she pointed him, doing
his best to dispose of his long legs.
“Give me the dog!” she
commanded. “You have no idea how to hold
him poor lamb!”
The dog was handed to her; she took
off her enormous hat with many sighs of fatigue, and
then, with the dog on her lap, asked how she was to
sit. Bentley explained that he wished to make
a few preliminary sketches of her head and bust, and
proceeded to pose her. She accepted his directions
with a curious pettishness, as though they annoyed
her; and presently complained loudly that the chair
was uncomfortable, and the pose irksome. He handled
her, however, with a good-humoured mixture of flattery
and persuasion, and at last, stepping back, surveyed
the result well content.
There was no doubt whatever that she
was a very handsome woman, and that her physical type that
of the more lethargic and heavily built Neapolitan suggested
very happily the mad and melancholy Queen. She
had superb black hair, eyes profoundly dark, a low
and beautiful brow, lips classically fine, a powerful
head and neck, and a complexion which, but for the
treatment given it, would have been of a clear and
beautiful olive. She wore a draggled dress of
cream-coloured muslin, very transparent over the shoulders,
somewhat scandalously wanting at the throat and breast,
and very frayed and dirty round the skirt. Her
feet, which were large and plump, were cased in extremely
pointed shoes with large paste buckles; and as she
crossed them on the stool provided for them she showed
a considerable amount of rather clumsy ankle.
The hands too were large, common, and ill-kept, and
the wrists laden with bracelets. She was adorned
indeed with a great deal of jewellery, including some
startling earrings of a bright green stone. The
hat, which she had carefully placed on a chair beside
her, was truly a monstrosity! but, as Doris
guessed, an expensive monstrosity, such as the Rue
de la Paix provides, at anything from a hundred and
fifty to two hundred and fifty francs, for those of
its cosmopolitan customers whom it pillages and despises.
How did the lady afford it? The rest of her dress
suggested a struggle with small means, waged by one
who was greedy for effect, obtained at a minimum of
trouble. That she was rouged and powdered goes
without saying.
And the young man? Doris perceived
at once his likeness to his father a feeble
likeness. But he was evidently simple and good-natured,
and to all appearance completely in the power of the
enchantress. He fanned her assiduously.
He picked up all the various belongings gloves,
handkerchiefs, handbag which she perpetually
let fall. He ran after the dog whenever it escaped
from the lady’s lap and threatened mischief in
the studio; and by way of amusing her the
purpose for which he had been imported he
kept up a stream of small cryptic gossip about various
common acquaintances, most of whom seemed to belong
to the music-hall profession, and to be either “stars”
or the satellites of “stars.” Madame
listened to him with avidity, and occasionally broke
into a giggling laugh. She had, however, two
manners, and two kinds of conversation, which she
adopted with the young man and the Academician respectively.
Her talk with the youth suggested the jealous ascendency
of a coarse-minded woman. She occasionally flattered
him, but more generally she teased or “ragged”
him. She seemed indeed to feel him securely in
her grip; so that there was no need to pose for him,
as figuratively as well as physically she
posed for Bentley. To the artist she gave her
opinions on pictures or books on the novels
of Mr. Wells, or the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw in
the languid or drawling tone of accepted authority;
dropping every now and then into a broad cockney accent,
which produced a startling effect, like that of unexpected
garlic in cookery. Bentley’s gravity was
often severely tried, and Doris altered the position
of her own easel so that he and she could not see
each other. Meanwhile Madame took not the smallest
notice of Mr. Bentley’s niece, and Doris made
no advances to the young man, to whom her name was
clearly quite unknown. Had Circe really got him
in her toils? Doris judged him soft-headed and
soft-hearted; no match at all for the lady. The
thought of her walking the lawns or the drawing-rooms
of Crosby Ledgers as the betrothed of the heir stirred
in Arthur Meadows’s wife a silent, and be
it confessed! a malicious convulsion.
Such mothers, so self-centred, so set on their own
triumphs, with their intellectual noses so very much
in the clouds, deserved such sons! She promised
herself to keep her own counsel, and watch the play.
The sitting lasted for two hours.
When it was over, Uncle Charles, all smiles and satisfaction,
went with his visitors to the front door.
He was away some little time, and
returned, bubbling, to the studio.
“She’s been cross-examining
me about her poems! I had to confess I hadn’t
read a word of them. And now she’s offered
to recite next time she comes! Good Heavens how
can I get out of it? I believe, Doris, she’s
hooked that young idiot! She told me she was engaged
to him. Do you know anything of his people?”
The girl accountant suddenly came
forward. She looked flushed and distressed.
“I do!” she said, with
energy. “Can’t somebody stop that?
It will break their hearts!”
Doris and Uncle Charles looked at her in amazement.
“Whose hearts?” said the painter.
“Lord and Lady Dunstable’s.”
“You know them?” exclaimed Doris.
“I used to know them quite
well,” said the girl, quietly. “My
father had one of Lord Dunstable’s livings.
He died last year. He didn’t like Lady
Dunstable. He quarrelled with her, because because
she once did a very rude thing to me. But this
would be too awful! And poor Lord Dunstable!
Everybody likes him. Oh it must be
stopped! it must!”