Marriage a la mode

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Marriage a la mode

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

Her cheeks had flushed a passionate red. The eyes which she had
inherited from her Spanish grandmother blazed above them. She had become
suddenly a woman of Andalusia and the South, moved by certain primitive
forces in the blood.

Madeleine Verrier held out her hands, smiling.

"Come here, little wild cat. I believe you are jealous of Elsie
Maddison."

Daphne approached her slowly, and slowly dropped into a seat beside her
friend, her eyes still fixed and splendid. But as she looked into them
Madeleine Verrier saw them suddenly dimmed.

"Daphne! you _are_ in love with him!"

The girl recovered herself, clenching her small hands. "If I am," she
said resolutely, "it is strange how like the other thing it is! I don't
know whether I shall speak to him to-night."

"To-night?" Mrs. Verrier looked a little puzzled.

"At the White House. You're going, of course."

"No, I am not going." The voice was quiet and cold. "I am not asked."

Daphne, vexed with herself, touched her friend's hand caressingly. "It
will be just a crush, dear. But I promised various people to go."

"And he will be there?"

"I suppose so." Daphne turned her head away, and then sprang up. "Have
you seen the picture?"

Mrs. Verrier followed her into the inner room, where the girl gave a
laughing and triumphant account of her acquisition, the agents she had
employed, the skill with which it had been conveyed out of Italy, the
wrath of various famous collectors, who had imagined that the fight lay
between them alone, when they found the prize had been ravished from
them. Madeleine Verrier was very intelligent, and the contrast, which
the story brought out, between the girl's fragile youth and the strange
and passionate sense of power which breathed from her whenever it became
a question of wealth and the use of it, was at no point lost upon her
companion.

Daphne would not allow any further talk of Roger Barnes. Her chaperon,
Mrs. Phillips, presently appeared, and passed through rather a bad
quarter of an hour while the imperious mistress of the house inquired
into certain invitations and card-leavings that had not been managed to
her liking. Then Daphne sat down to write a letter to a Girls' Club in
New York, of which she was President--where, in fact, she occasionally
took the Singing Class, with which she had made so much play at her
first meeting with Roger Barnes. She had to tell them that she had just
engaged a holiday house for them, to which they might go in instalments
throughout the summer. She would pay the rent, provide a
lady-superintendent, and make herself responsible for all but food
expenses. Her small face relaxed--became quite soft and charming--as she
wrote.

"But, my dear," cried Mrs. Phillips in dismay, as Daphne handed her the
letter to read, "you have taken the house on Lake George, and you know
the girls had all set their hearts on that place in the White
Mountains!"

Daphne's lips tightened. "Certainly I have taken the house on Lake
George," she said, as she carefully wiped her pen. "I told them I
should."

"But, my dear, they are so tired of Lake George! They have been there
three years running. And you know they subscribe a good deal
themselves."

"Very well!--then let them do without my help. I have inquired into the
matter. The house on Lake George is much more suitable than the White
Mountains farm, and I have written to the agent. The thing's done."

Mrs. Phillips argued a little more, but Daphne was immovable.

Mrs. Verrier, watching the two, reflected, as she had often done before,
that Mrs. Phillips's post was not particularly enviable. Daphne treated
her in many ways with great generosity, paid her highly, grudged her no
luxury, and was always courteous to her in public. But in private
Daphne's will was law, and she had an abrupt and dictatorial way of
asserting it that brought the red back into Mrs. Phillips's faded
cheeks. Mrs. Verrier had often expected her to throw up her post. But
there was no doubt something in Daphne's personality which made life
beside her too full of colour to be lightly abandoned.

* * * * *

Daphne presently went upstairs to take off her walking-dress, and Mrs.
Phillips, with a rather troubled face, began to tidy the confusion of
letters she had left behind her.

"I dare say the girls won't mind," said Madeleine Verrier, kindly.

Mrs. Phillips started, and her mild lips quivered a little. Daphne's
charities were for Daphne an amusement; for this gentle, faded woman,
who bore all the drudgery of them, they were the chief attraction of
life in Daphne's house. Mrs. Phillips loved the club-girls, and the
thought of their disappointment pained her.

"I must try and put it to them," was her patient reply.

"Daphne must always have her way," Madeleine went on, smiling. "I wonder
what she'll do when she marries."

Mrs. Phillips looked up quickly.

"I hope it'll be the right man, Mrs. Verrier. Of course, with anyone
so--so clever--and so used to managing everything for herself--one would
be a little anxious."

Mrs. Verrier's expression changed. A kind of
wildness--fanaticism--invaded it, as of one recalling a mission. "Oh,
well, nothing is irrevocable nowadays," she said, almost with violence.
"Still I hope Daphne won't make a mistake."

Mrs. Phillips looked at her companion, at first in astonishment. Then a
change passed over her face. With a cold excuse she left Mrs. Verrier
alone.

CHAPTER IV

The reception at the White House was being given in honour of the
delegates to a Peace Congress. The rooms were full without being
inconveniently crowded and the charming house opened its friendly doors
to a society more congruous and organic, richer also in the nobler kind
of variety than America, perhaps, can offer to her guests elsewhere.
What the opera and international finance are to New York, politics and
administration are, as we all know, to Washington. And the visitor
from Europe, conversationally starved for want of what seem to him
the only topics worth discussing, finds himself within hearing once
more of ministers, cabinets, embassies, and parliamentary gossip.
Even General Hobson had come to admit that--especially for the
middle-aged--Washington parties were extremely agreeable. The young and
foolish might sigh for the flesh-pots of New York; those on whom "the
black ox had trodden," who were at all aware what a vast tormenting,
multitudinous, and headstrong world man has been given to inhabit; those
who were engaged in governing any part of that world, or meant some day
to be thus engaged; for them Washington was indispensable, and New York
a mere entertainment.

Moreover Washington, at this time of the world's history, was the scene
of one of those episodes--those brisker moments in the human
comedy--which every now and then revive among us an almost forgotten
belief in personality, an almost forgotten respect for the mysteries
behind it. The guests streaming through the White House defiled past a
man who, in a level and docketed world, appeared to his generation as
the reincarnation of forces primitive, over-mastering, and heroic. An
honest Odysseus!--toil-worn and storm-beaten, yet still with the spirit
and strength, the many devices, of a boy; capable like his prototype in
one short day of crushing his enemies, upholding his friends, purifying
his house; and then, with the heat of righteous battle still upon him,
with its gore, so to speak, still upon his hands, of turning his mind,
without a pause and without hypocrisy, to things intimate and soft and
pure--the domestic sweetness of Penelope, the young promise of
Telemachus. The President stood, a rugged figure, amid the cosmopolitan
crowd, breasting the modern world, like some ocean headland, yet not
truly of it, one of the great fighters and workers of mankind, with a
laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue some
converse of their own, and a hand that grasped and cheered, where other
hands withdrew and repelled. This one man's will had now, for some
years, made the pivot on which vast issues turned--issues of peace and
war, of policy embracing the civilized world; and, here, one saw him in
drawing-rooms, discussing Alaric's campaigns with an Oxford professor,
or chatting with a young mother about her children.

Beside him, the human waves, as they met and parted, disclosed a woman's
face, modelled by nature in one of her lightest and deftest moods, a
trifle detached, humorous also, as though the world's strange sights
stirred a gentle and kindly mirth behind its sweet composure. The
dignity of the President's wife was complete, yet it had not
extinguished the personality it clothed; and where royalty, as the
European knows it, would have donned its mask and stood on its defence,
Republican royalty dared to be its amused, confiding, natural self.

All around--the political, diplomatic world of Washington. General
Hobson, as he passed through it, greeted by what was now a large
acquaintance, found himself driven once more to the inward
confession--the grudging confession--as though Providence had not played
him fair in extorting it--that American politicians were of a vastly
finer stamp than he had expected to find them. The American press was
all--he vowed--that fancy had painted it, and more. But, as he looked
about him at the members of the President's administration--at this
tall, black-haired man, for instance, with the mild and meditative eye,
the equal, social or intellectual, of any Foreign Minister that Europe
might pit against him, or any diplomat that might be sent to handle him;
or this younger man, sparely built, with the sane, handsome face--son of
a famous father, modest, amiable, efficient; or this other, of huge bulk
and height, the sport of caricature, the hope of a party, smiling
already a presidential smile as he passed, observed and beset, through
the crowded rooms; or these naval or military men, with their hard
serviceable looks, and the curt good manners of their kind:--the General
saw as clearly as anybody else, that America need make no excuses
whatever for her best men, that she has evolved the leaders she wants,
and Europe has nothing to teach them.

He could only console himself by the remembrance of a speech, made by a
well-known man, at a military function which the General had attended as
a guest of honour the day before. There at last was the real thing! The
real, Yankee, spread-eagle thing! The General positively hugged the
thought of it.

"The American soldier," said the speaker, standing among the
ambassadors, the naval and military _attaches_, of all the European
nations, "is the superior of all other soldiers in three
respects--bravery, discipline, intelligence."

_Bravery, discipline, intelligence!_ Just those--the merest trifle! The
General had found himself chuckling over it in the visions of the night.

Tired at last of these various impressions, acting on a mind not quite
alert enough to deal with them, the General went in search of his
nephew. Roger had been absent all day, and the General had left the
hotel before his return. But the uncle was sure that he would sooner or
later put in an appearance.

It was of course entirely on Roger's account that this unwilling guest
of America was her guest still. For three weeks now had the General been
watching the affair between Roger and Daphne Floyd. It had gone with
such a rush at first, such a swing and fervour, that the General had
felt that any day might bring the _denouement_. It was really impossible
to desert the lad at such a crisis, especially as Laura was so excitable
and anxious, and so sure to make her brother pay for it if he failed to
support her views and ambitions at the right moment. The General
moreover felt the absolute necessity of getting to know something more
about Miss Floyd, her character, the details of her fortune and
antecedents, so that when the great moment came he might be prepared.

But the astonishing thing was that of late the whole affair seemed to
have come to some stupid hitch! Roger had been behaving like a very cool
hand--too cool by half in the General's opinion. What the deuce did he
mean by hanging about these Boston ladies, if his affections were really
fixed on Miss Daphne?--or his ambitions, which to the uncle seemed
nearer the truth.

"Well, where is the nephew?" said Cecilia Boyson's voice in his ear.

The General turned. He saw a sharp, though still young face, a thin and
willowy figure, attired in white silk, a _pince-nez_ on the high-pitched
nose, and a cool smile. Unconsciously his back stiffened. Miss Boyson
invariably roused in him a certain masculine antagonism.

"I should be glad if you would tell me," he said, with some formality.
"There are two or three people here to whom he should be introduced."

"Has he been picnicking with the Maddisons?" The voice was shrill,
perhaps malicious.

"I believe they took him to Arlington, and somewhere else afterwards."

"Ah," said Cecilia, "there they are."

The General looked towards the door and saw his nephew enter, behind a
mother and daughter whom, as it seemed to him, their acquaintances in
the crowd around them greeted with a peculiar cordiality; the mother,
still young, with a stag-like carriage of the head, a long throat,
swathed in white tulle, and grizzled hair, on which shone a spray of
diamonds; the daughter, equally tall and straight, repeating her
mother's beauty with a bloom and radiance of her own. Innocent and
happy, with dark eyes and a soft mouth, Miss Maddison dropped a little
curtsey to the presidential pair, and the room turned to look at her as
she did so.

"A very sweet-looking girl," said the General warmly. "Her father is, I
think, a professor."

"He was. He is now just a writer of books. But Elsie was brought up in
Cambridge. How did Mr. Roger know them?"

"His Eton tutor told him to go and see them."

"I thought Miss Floyd expected him to-day?" said Miss Boyson carelessly,
adjusting her eyeglass.

"It was a mistake, a misunderstanding," replied the General hurriedly.
"Miss Floyd's party is put off till next week."

"Daphne is just coming in," said Miss Boyson.

The General turned again. The watchful Cecilia was certain that _he_ was
not in love with Daphne. But the nephew--the inordinately handsome, and
by now much-courted young man--what was the real truth about him?

Cecilia recognized--with Mrs. Verrier--that merely to put the question
involved a certain tribute to young Barnes. He had at any rate done his
fortune-hunting, if fortune-hunting it were, with decorum.

"Miss Floyd is looking well to-night," remarked the General.

Cecilia did not reply. She and a great part of the room were engaged in
watching Roger Barnes and Miss Maddison walking together through a space
which seemed to have been cleared on purpose for them, but was really
the result of a move towards the supper-room.

"Was there ever such a pair?" said an enthusiastic voice behind the
General. "Athene and Apollo take the floor!" A gray-haired journalist
with a small, bewrinkled face, buried in whiskers, and beard, laid a
hand on the General's arm as he spoke.

The General smiled vaguely. "Do you know Mrs. and Miss Maddison?"

"Rather!" said the little man. "Miss Elsie's a wonder! As pretty and
soft as they make them, and a Greek scholar besides--took all sorts of
honours at Radcliffe last year. I've known her from her cradle."

"What a number of your girls go to college!" said the General, but
ungraciously, in the tones of one who no sooner saw an American custom
emerging than his instinct was to hit it.

"Yes; it's a feature of our modern life--the life of our women. But not
the most significant one, by a long way."

The General could not help a look of inquiry.

The journalist's face changed from gay to grave. "The most significant
thing in American life just now----"

"I know!" interrupted the General. "Your divorce laws!"

The journalist shook his head. "It goes deeper than that. What we're
looking on at is a complete transformation of the idea of marriage----"

A movement in the crowd bore the speaker away. The General was left
watching the beautiful pair in the distance. They were apparently quite
unconscious that they roused any special attention. Laughing and
chatting like two children, they passed into the supper-room and
disappeared.

Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies
with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose
necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth
century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however,
knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss
Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like
embarrassment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in
the girl's dark eyes.

"I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me
you went to the Senate."

Daphne looked him up and down. "Did I?" she said slowly. "I've
forgotten. Will you move, please? There's someone bringing me an ice."
And turning her back on Roger, she smiled and beckoned to the
Under-Secretary, who with a triumphant face was making his way to her
through the crowd.

Roger coloured hotly. "May I bring Mrs. Maddison?" he said, passing her;
"she would like to talk to you about a party for next week----"

"Thank you. I am just going home." And with an energetic movement she
freed herself from him, and was soon in the gayest of talk with the
Under-Secretary.

* * * * *

The reception broke up some time after midnight, and on the way home
General Hobson attempted a raid upon his nephew's intentions.

"I don't wish to seem an intrusive person, my dear Roger, but may I ask
how much longer you mean to stay in Washington?"

The tone was short and the look which accompanied the words not without
sarcasm. Roger, who had been walking beside his companion, still deeply
flushed, in complete silence, gave an awkward laugh.

"And as for you, Uncle Archie, I thought you meant to sail a fortnight
ago. If you've been staying on like this on my account----"

"Don't make a fool either of me or yourself, Roger!" said the General
hastily, roused at last to speech by the annoyance of the situation. "Of
course it was on your account that I have stayed on. But what on earth
it all means, and where your affairs are--I'm hanged if I have the
glimmer of an idea!"

Roger's smile was perfectly good-humoured.

"I haven't much myself," he said quietly.

"Do you--or do you not--mean to propose to Miss Floyd?" cried the
General, pausing in the centre of Lafayette Square, now all but
deserted, and apostrophizing with his umbrella--for the night was soft
and rainy--the presidential statue above his head.

"Have I given you reason to suppose that I was going to do so?" said
Roger slowly.

"Given me?--given everybody reason?--of course you have!--a dozen times
over. I don't like interfering with your affairs, Roger--with any young
man's affairs--but you must know that you have set Washington talking,
and it's not fair to a girl--by George it isn't!--when she has given you
encouragement and you have made her conspicuous, to begin the same
story, in the same place, immediately, with someone else! As you say, I
ought to have taken myself off long ago."

"I didn't say anything of the kind," said Roger hotly; "you shouldn't
put words into my mouth, Uncle Archie. And I really don't see why you
attack me like this. My tutor particularly asked me, if I came across
them, to be civil to Mrs. Maddison and her daughter, and I have done
nothing but pay them the most ordinary attentions."

"When a man is in love he pays no ordinary attentions. He has eyes for
no one but the lady." The General's umbrella, as it descended from the
face of Andrew Jackson and rattled on the flagged path, supplied each
word with emphasis. "However, it is no good talking, and I don't exactly
know why I should put my old oar in. But the fact is I feel a certain
responsibility. People here have been uncommonly civil. Well,
well!--I've wired to-day to ask if there is a berth left in the
_Venetia_ for Saturday. And you, I suppose"--the inquiry was somewhat
peremptory--"will be going back to New York?"

"I have no intention of leaving Washington just yet," said Roger, with
decision.

"And may I ask what you intend to do here?"

Roger laughed. "I really think that's my business. However, you've been
an awful brick, Uncle Archie, to stay on like this. I assure you, if I
don't say much, I think it."

By this time they had reached the hotel, the steps and hall of which
were full of people.

"That's how you put me off." The General's tone was resentful. "And you
won't give me any idea of the line I am to take with your mother?"

The young man smiled again and waved an evasive hand.

"If you'll only be patient a little longer, Uncle Archie----"

At this point an acquaintance of the General's who was smoking in the
hall came forward to greet him, and Roger made his escape.

* * * * *

"Well, what the deuce _do_ I mean to do?" Barnes asked himself the
question deliberately. He was hanging out of the window, in his bedroom,
smoking and pondering.

It was a mild and rainy night. Washington was full of the earth and leaf
odours of the spring, which rose in gusts from its trees and gardens;
and rugged, swiftly moving clouds disclosed every now and then what
looked like hurrying stars.

The young man was excited and on edge. Daphne Floyd--and the thought of
Daphne Floyd--had set his pulses hammering; they challenged in him the
aggressive, self-assertive, masculine force. The history of the
preceding three weeks was far from simple. He had first paid a
determined court to her, conducting it in an orthodox, English,
conspicuous way. His mother, and her necessities--his own also--imposed
it on him; and he flung himself into it, setting his teeth. Then, to his
astonishment, one may almost say to his disconcerting, he found the prey
all at once, and, as it were, without a struggle, fluttering to his
lure, and practically within his grasp. There was an evening when
Daphne's sudden softness, the look in her eyes, the inflection in her
voice had fairly thrown him off his balance. For the first time he had
shown a lack of self-command and self-possession. Whereupon, in a flash,
a new and strange Daphne had developed--imperious, difficult,
incalculable. The more he gave, the more she claimed. Nor was it mere
girlish caprice. The young Englishman, invited to a game that he had
never yet played, felt in it something sinister and bewildering.
Gropingly, he divined in front of him a future of tyranny on her side,
of expected submission on his. The Northern character in him, with its
reserve, its phlegm, its general sanity, began to shrink from the
Southern elements in her. He became aware of the depths in her nature,
of things volcanic and primitive, and the English stuff in him recoiled.

So he was to be bitted and bridled, it seemed, in the future. Daphne
Floyd would have bought him with her dollars, and he would have to pay
the price.

Something natural and wild in him said No! If he married this girl he
would be master, in spite of her money. He realized vaguely, at any
rate, the strength of her will, and the way in which it had been
tempered and steeled by circumstance. But the perception only roused in
himself some slumbering tenacities and vehemences of which he had been
scarcely aware. So that, almost immediately--since there was no glamour
of passion on his side--he began to resent her small tyrannies, to draw
in, and draw back. A few quarrels--not ordinary lovers' quarrels, but
representing a true grapple of personalities--sprang up behind a screen
of trifles. Daphne was once more rude and provoking, Roger cool and
apparently indifferent. This was the stage when Mrs. Verrier had become
an admiring observer of what she supposed to be his "tactics." But she
knew nothing of the curious little crisis which had preceded them.

Then the Maddisons, mother and daughter, "my tutor's friends," had
appeared upon the scene--charming people! Of course civilities were due
to them, and had to be paid them. Next to his mother--and to the girl of
the orchard--the affections of this youth, who was morally backward and
immature, but neither callous nor fundamentally selfish, had been
chiefly given to a certain Eton master, of a type happily not uncommon
in English public schools. Herbert French had been Roger's earliest and
best friend. What Roger had owed him at school, only he knew. Since
school-days they had been constant correspondents, and French's
influence on his pupil's early manhood had done much, for all Roger's
laziness and self-indulgence, to keep him from serious lapses.

Neglect any friends of his--and such jolly friends? Rather not! But as
soon as Daphne had seen Elsie Maddison, and he had begged an afternoon
to go on an expedition with them, Daphne had become intolerable. She had
shown her English friend and his acquaintances a manner so insulting and
provocative, that the young man's blood had boiled.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15