had been sent to Teheran--and "George" was to be military secretary in Dublin--and "Barbara" to the astonishment of everybody had consented to be made a Woman of the Bedchamber--"poor Queen!"--how Reginald Pratt had been handsomely turned out of the Middleswick seat, and was probably going to "rat" to an Opposition that promised more than the Government--that Cecilia"s eldest girl--"a pretty little minx"--had been already presented, and was likely to prove as skilful a campaigner for a husband as her mother before her--that "Gerald" had lost heavily at Newmarket, and was now a financial nuisance, borrowing from everybody in the family--and so on, and so on.
Melrose received these various items of information half scornfully, half greedily; it might have been guessed that his interest in the teller was a good deal keener than his interest in the things told. The conversation revealed to Netta phases in her husband"s existence wholly unknown to her. So Edmund had been in Rome--for two or three years--in the Emba.s.sy!
That she had never known. He seemed also to have been an English member of Parliament for a time. In any case he had lived, apparently for years, like other men of his kind--shooting, racing, visiting, travelling, fighting, elections. She could not fit the facts to which both alluded with her own recollections of the misanthrope who had first made acquaintance with her and her family in Florence three years before this date; and her bewilderment grew.
As for the others, they had soon, it seemed, completely forgotten the thin sallow-faced wife, who sat with her back to the window, restlessly twisting her rings.
Presently Melrose stopped abruptly--in front of Lady Tatham.
"Where is Edith?" He bent forward peremptorily, his hand on the table, his eyes on the lady"s face.
"At the Cape with her husband."
"Has she found him out yet?"
"There"s nothing to find out. He"s an excellent fellow."
"A stupid prig," said Melrose pa.s.sionately. "Well, you did it!--You did it!"
"Yes, I did it." Lady Tatham rose quietly. She had paled, and after a minute"s hesitation she held out her hand to Melrose. "Suppose, Edmund, we bury the hatchet. I should like to be friends with you and your wife, if you would allow it?"
The change of manner was striking. Up to this moment Lady Tatham had been, so to speak, the aggressor, venturing audaciously on ground which she knew to be hostile--from bravado?--or for some hidden reason? But she spoke now with seriousness--even with a touch of womanly kindness.
Melrose looked at her furiously.
"Lady Tatham, I advise you to leave us alone!"
She sighed, met his eyes a moment, gravely, then turned to Netta.
"Mrs. Melrose, your husband and I have an old quarrel. He wanted to marry my sister. I prevented it. She is married now--and he is married. Why shouldn"t we make friends?"
"Quarrels are very foolish!" said Netta, sententiously, straightening her small shoulders. But she dared not look at Melrose.
"Well, tell him so," laughed Lady Tatham. "And come and see me at Duddon Castle."
"Thank you! I should like to!" cried Netta.
"My wife has no carriage, Lady Tatham."
"Oh, Edmund--we might hire something," said his wife imploringly.
"I do not permit it," he said resolutely. "Good-bye, Lady Tatham. You are like all women--you think the cracked vase will hold water. It won"t."
"What are you going to do here, Edmund?"
"I am a collector--and works of art amuse me."
"And I can do nothing--for you--or your wife?"
"Nothing. I am sorry if you feel us on your mind. Don"t. I would have gone farther from you, if I could. But seven miles--are seven miles."
Lady Tatham coloured. She shook hands with Netta.
Melrose held the door open for her. She swept through the hall, and hurried into her carriage. She and Melrose touched hands ceremoniously, and the brougham with its fine roan horses was soon out of sight.
A miserable quarrel followed between the husband and wife. Netta, dissolved in hysterical weeping, protested that she was a prisoner and an exile, that Edmund had brought her from Italy to this dreary place to kill her, that she couldn"t and wouldn"t endure it, and that return to Italy she must and would, if she had to beg her way. It was cruel to shut her up in that awful house, to deny her the means of getting about, to treat people who wished to be kind to her as Edmund had treated Lady Tatham. She was not a mere caterpillar to be trodden on. She would appeal to the neighbours--she would go home to her parents, etcetera--etcetera.
Melrose at first tried to check her by sarcasm--a banter that stung where it lit. But when she would not be checked, when she followed him into his study, wailing and accusing, a whirlwind of rage developed in the man, and he denounced her with a violence and a brutality which presently cowed her. She ran shivering upstairs to Anastasia and the baby, bolted her door, and never reappeared till, twenty-four hours later, she crept down white and silent, to find a certain comfort in Thyrza"s rough ministrations. Melrose seemed to be, perhaps, a trifle ashamed of his behaviour; and they patched up a peace over the arrangements for the heating of the house on which for once he had the grace to consult her.
The winter deepened, and Christmas came. On the mountain-tops the snow lay deep, and when Netta--who on many days never left the house--after walking a while up and down the long corridor for the sake of exercise, would sink languidly on the seat below its large western window, she looked out upon a confusion of hills near and far, drawn in hard white upon an inky sky. To the south the Helvellyn range stretched in bold-flung curves and bosses; in the far distance rose the sharper peaks of Derwent.w.a.ter; while close at hand Blencathra with its ravines, and all the harsh splendour of its white slopes and black precipices, alternately fascinated and repelled the little Southerner, starved morally and physically for lack of sun.
Even for c.u.mbria it was a chill and sunless winter. No bracing frosts, and persistent northwesterly winds. Day after day the rain, which was snow on the heights, poured down. Derwent.w.a.ter and Ba.s.senthwaite rose till they mingled in one vast lake. The streams thundered from the fells; every road was a water-course.
Netta lost flesh and appet.i.te. She was a discontented and ailing woman, and the Dixons could not but notice her fragile state. Mrs. Dixon thought her "n.o.bbut a silly sort of body," but would sometimes try to cook what pleased her, or let Anastasia use the kitchen fire for "gnocchi" or "risotto" or other queer messes; which, however, when they appeared, were generally more relished by the master than the mistress.
Dixon, perceiving no signs of any desire on Netta"s part to attend the "papish" chapel ten miles away, began to plot for her soul. His own life was in the little Methodist chapel to which he walked four miles every Sunday, wet or fine. In the summer he had accompanied the minister and one or two cla.s.s leaders in a drive through the hayfields, shouting to the haymakers--"We"re going to heaven!--won"t you come with us!"--and he had been known to spend five hours at a stretch on his knees wrestling for the salvation of a drunken friend, in the village of Threlkeld. But Netta baffled him. Sometimes he would come home from chapel, radiant, and would take her a bunch of holly for the table by way of getting into conversation with her. "It was _fine_ to-day, Missis! There was three found peace. And the congregation was grand! There was four attorneys--two of "em from as far as Pengarth." And he would lend her tracts--and even offer, good man, to borrow a "shandrey" from a neighbour, and drive her himself to the chapel service. But Netta only smiled or yawned at him; and as for the tracts, she hid them under the few sofa cushions the house possessed.
Mr. Tyson, the agent, came to the house as seldom as he could, that he might not quarrel with his employer before it was to his own interest to do so. Netta discovered that he pitied her; and once or twice, drawing on the arts of flirtation, with which the Florentine woman is always well acquainted, she complained to him of her loneliness and her husband"s unkindness. But his north-country caution protected him from any sentimentalizing, however innocent. And before the end of the winter Netta detested him. Meanwhile she and Anastasia lived for one hope only.
From many indications it was plain that Melrose was going south in March.
The women were determined not to stay behind him. But, instinctively, they never raised the subject, so as not to risk a struggle prematurely.
Meanwhile Melrose pa.s.sed a winter wholly satisfactory to himself. The partial unpacking of his collections was an endless source of amus.e.m.e.nt and pleasure. But his curious egotism showed itself very plainly in the business. He made no attempt at artistic arrangement, though there was some cla.s.sification. As fast as one room was filled--the vacant packing-cases turned on their sides, serving to exhibit what they had once contained--he would begin upon another. And woe to Mrs. Dixon or Thyrza if they attempted any cleaning in one of his rooms! The collections were for himself only, and for the few dealers or experts to whom he chose to show them. And the more hugger-mugger they were, the less he should be pestered to let people in to see them. Occasionally he would rush up to London to attend what he called a "high puff sale"--or to an auction in one of the northern towns, and as he always bought largely, purchases kept arriving, and the house at the end of the winter was in a scarcely less enc.u.mbered and disorderly condition than it had been at the beginning. The few experts from the Continent or America, whom he did admit, were never allowed a word of criticism of the collections. If they ventured to differ from Melrose as to the genuineness or the age of a bronze or a marble, an explosion of temper and a speedy dismissal awaited them.
One great stroke of luck befel him in February which for a time put him in high good-humour. He bought at York--very cheaply--a small bronze Hermes, which some fifteenth-century doc.u.ments in his own possession, purchased from a Florentine family the year before, enabled him to identify with great probability as the work of one of the rarest and most famous of the Renaissance sculptors. He told no one outside the house, lest he should be plagued to exhibit it, but he could not help boasting of it to Netta and Anastasia.
"That"s what comes of having _an eye_! It"s worth a thousand guineas of it"s worth a penny. And those stupid idiots let me have it for twenty-two pounds!"
"A thousand guineas!" Gradually the little bronze became to Netta the symbol of all that money could have bought for her--and all she was denied; Italy, freedom, the small pleasures she understood, and the salvation of her family, now in the direst poverty. There were moments when she could have flung it pa.s.sionately out of the window into the stream a hundred feet below. But she was to find another use for it.
March arrived. And one day Anastasia came to tell her mistress that she had received orders to pack Mr. Melrose"s portmanteaus for departure.
Netta brooded all day, sitting silent and pale in the window-seat, with some embroidery which she never touched on her knee. Outside, not a sign of spring! A bitter north wind was blowing which had blanched all colour from the hills, and there was ice on the edges of the streams. Thyrza was away in Carlisle, helping an aunt. There was no one in the house but Mrs.
Dixon, and a deaf old woman from one of the labourer"s cottages; attached to the farm, who had come in to help her. The poor babe had a cold, and could be heard fretfully crying and coughing in her nursery.
And before Netta"s inward eye there stretched the interminable days and weeks ahead, no less than the interminable weeks and months she had already lived through, in this discomfort of body, and this loneliness of spirit.
After supper she walked resolutely into her husband"s littered study and demanded that she and Anastasia and the baby should go with him to the Continent. He, she understood, would stop in Paris. She and the child would push on to Florence, where she could stay the summer with her people, at no greater cost than at the Tower. The change was necessary both for her and Felicia, and go she would.
Melrose flatly and violently refused. What did she want better than the Tower? She had as much service, and as much luxury as her antecedents ent.i.tled her to; and he neither could nor would provide her with anything more. He was heavily in debt, and had no money to spend on railway tickets. And he entirely disapproved of her relations, especially of her father, who might any day find himself "run in" by the Italian authorities for illicit smuggling of pictures out of the country. He declined to allow his child to become familiar with such a circle.
Netta listened to him with tight lips, her pale face strangely flushed.
When she saw that her appeal was quite fruitless she went away, and she and Anastasia sat up whispering together far into the night.
Early next morning Melrose departed, leaving a letter for his wife, in which he informed her that he had left money with Mr. Tyson for the household expenses, and for the few shillings he supposed she would want as pocket money. He advised her to be out a great deal, and a.s.sured her that the c.u.mbria summer, when it came, was delightful. And he signed himself "your affectionate husband, Edmund Melrose."
Mrs. Dixon went into Pengarth for shopping on the fly which conveyed Melrose to the station, and was to come out by carrier. After their departure there was no one left in the house but the deaf old woman.
Netta and her maid preceeded to carry out a plan they had been long maturing. Anastasia had a few pounds left of her Christmas wages; enough to carry them to London; and for the rest, they had imagined an excellent device.
The bronze Hermes had been left by Melrose in a cupboard in a locked room on the first floor. When Mrs. Dixon came back that night, she discovered that Mrs. Melrose, with her child and maid had quitted the house. They had apparently harnessed the cart and horse themselves, and had driven into Pengarth, taking a labourer with them to bring the cart home. They had carried all their personal belongings away with them; and, after a while, Mrs. Dixon, poking about, discovered that the door of one of the locked rooms had been forced.