"Sorry I"ve been so dull these last few weeks," she murmured. "Tony, do you still love me?"
"You never need ask me that," he said. "But do you love me?"
She nodded.
"Couldn"t you say it? You never have, you know. Couldn"t you just whisper "yes"?"
"Yes."
"Cleared it," he shouted, and while he was in his dressing-room she heard him singing:
"For Dolly"s out and about again, She doesn"t give a d.a.m.n for a shower of rain.
Here"s Dolly with her collie!
And London, dear old London, London is itself again."
This outburst was followed by a silence which was presently broken by a sound of torn paper.
"What are you tearing up, Tony?"
"Oh, nothing," he called back, in accents of elaborate indifference.
"Only an old program."
In the morning Dorothy looked in the paper-basket, the bottom of which was lightly powdered by the fragments of a letter. She stooped to pick up the pieces; then she stopped.
"What does it matter who it was for? It was never sent. But I was only just in time."
On October 15th a party of eight visited "The Belle of Belgravia" at the Vanity. Besides Tony and Dorothy, there were Arthur Lonsdale, who had long forgotten all about Queenie Molyneux and could now watch a musical comedy as coldly as a dramatic critic whose paper did not depend on the theatrical advertis.e.m.e.nts. He brought his partner, Adrian Lee, whose pretty little wife, all cheeks and hair, looked much more like an actress than Dorothy, though she was really the daughter of a bishop.
People used to wonder how a bishop came to have such a daughter; they forgot that while he was a vicar he had written a commentary on the Song of Solomon, with foot-notes as luscious as the plums that sink to the bottom of a cake. Harry Tufton came, and a Mrs. Foster-ffrench who went everywhere except where she most wanted to go and was always a little resentful that even with her two "f"s" she could not hook herself up to some alt.i.tudes. However, that was Mrs. Foster-ffrench"s private sorrow, and she did not let it mar a jolly evening. The other guests were Capt.
Archibald Keith, late of the 16th Hussars, who had abandoned the cavalry in order to write the librettos of musical comedies, and a Mrs.
Mainwaring, who kept a fashionable hat-shop in Bruton Street and was the widow of poor d.i.c.k Mainwaring, a brother of Lord Hughenden. Everybody always spoke about him as poor d.i.c.k Mainwaring, but whether because he had been killed at Paardeburg or because he had married Rita Daubeny was uncertain; it probably varied with the point of view of the speaker. The friends of Mrs. Mainwaring put down any oddness in her behavior to French creole blood and a childhood in Martinique; to the former was also attributable her chic in hats; to the latter the dryness and pallor of her complexion; French blood or French brandy, Martinique or Martell, the Hon. Mrs. Richard Mainwaring certainly did stimulate conversation just as paprika stimulates the appet.i.te. But however jocund her life, her hats were chaste, and however sharp her play, her name was honorable. Moreover, so many people owed her money that they had to be pleasant to her. Mrs. Foster-ffrench, in spite of her name, had no French blood to excuse her odd behavior; in fact, she had nothing except a hyphen and those two "f"s." Mr. Foster-ffrench was a younger son who, having failed to grow sisal profitably in the Bahamas, was now experimenting in Mozambique with the jikungo or Inhambane nut, and liable at any moment to experiment with vanila in Tahiti or pearls on the Great Barrier Reef; the only experiment he was never likely to make was going back to Mrs. Foster-ffrench. Dorothy wondered what Tony found to attract him in such a gathering; yet he was in tremendous spirits, obviously delighted that Archie Keith should have met the Vanity comedian that afternoon and warned him who would be in front. He was proud that all the girls on the stage kept their eyes on Dorothy throughout the evening, proud that the comedian inserted two special gags for the benefit of the jolly party, which were rewarded by a loud burst of laughter; and when the alarmed audience trained their opera-gla.s.ses upon the boxes as a beleagured garrison might train their guns upon the wild yell of savages he was radiant. After the performance they sat round a large circular table in the Savoy, and when the orchestra played "Dolly and her Collie" there was so much applause from the tables all round that Dorothy could not help feeling rather proud of the pleasure her return to town had given and was touched to think that her memory was still green. The evening wound up at the Lees" flat in Berkeley Street, when Adrian Lee and Clarehaven hospitably lost a good deal of money to their guests in the course of three hours" baccarat.
Now that Dorothy had broken her rule and had visited the Vanity for the first time since she had left the boards, she felt that she could not maintain her policy of isolation any longer; she told Clarehaven as much when they were strolling back down Curzon Street and breathing in the air of night after those feverish rooms.
"Doodles, my dear thing, I"m delighted! I never wanted you to give up any of your old friends. It was you who insisted on cutting them out like that."
"And if," she went on, "we can sit in a box with Rita Mainwaring, I don"t think I can keep up this pretense of not being able to meet Olive."
"I quite agree with you. I should love to meet Olive again."
"Then what about asking her to lunch?" Dorothy suggested.
"The sooner the better," he a.s.sented, enthusiastically.
A note was sent round to the Vanity, in which Dorothy, without making the least allusion to anything that had happened in the past, most cordially invited Olive to lunch with them two days later. Olive replied, thanking Dorothy for the invitation, but mentioned that she was now living with Sylvia Scarlett, and, since she did not like to go without her and since she knew Dorothy and Sylvia were no longer on good terms, was afraid she must decline lunch, though she promised to come and see her old friend some afternoon.
"Living with Sylvia Scarlett, eh?" commented Tony, with raised eyebrows.
They were sitting in the smoking-room, where in the silence that ensued the red arm-chairs seemed to be commenting upon this problem raised so suddenly, seemed, like wise and rubicund ministers of state, to be bringing their minds to bear silently upon things in general. "Sylvia Scarlett!" Dorothy kept saying to herself, while the scarlet leather answered her. She was perplexed. For one reason she should like to meet Sylvia again, because she felt that better, perhaps, than anybody Sylvia would appreciate her point of view. Could she but bring herself to be frank with Sylvia, she could think of no one who would respond with a more intelligent sympathy to the tale of her disappointment. Moreover, if she showed the least disinclination to exclude Sylvia she might give Tony the impression that she was still resenting that week-end at Brighton, a notion which her pride was not sufficiently subdued to contemplate with equanimity. Yet to make friends again with Sylvia openly would be to penetrate rather more deeply into the hinterland of the bohemian seacoast than she had intended, even after going to the Vanity with Mrs. Mainwaring and Mrs. Foster-ffrench.
"I suppose you wouldn"t care to have Sylvia here," Tony said at last; "though of course...."
Dorothy interrupted him sharply. "Why not?" she asked. "Why should I object to have Sylvia here any more than I should object to being seen at the theater with Rita Mainwaring?"
"I thought that perhaps...." he began again.
She told him to ring for a messenger-boy and immediately wrote to invite Sylvia to lunch as well.
It was difficult, considering the circ.u.mstances in which Dorothy had parted from Sylvia and Olive, for any of the girls to avoid a feeling of constraint when they met again; Dorothy, for her part, had to make a great effort not to let her nervousness give an impression that she was being reserved with her old friends. Lonsdale, however, who had fortunately been invited, was very talkative, and Tony was in boisterous spirits, so boisterous, indeed, that once or twice Dorothy looked at him in surprise. When he returned her glance defiantly she wondered if she had not made a mistake in her policy; if before consenting to come down to her husband"s level she had properly safeguarded herself. No doubt in spite of her disapproval he would have gambled and drunk and made an a.s.s of himself with the Mainwarings and the Foster-ffrenches, but by withholding herself she would have retained, at any rate, as much power over him as would have kept him outwardly deferential to his wife. Now he was no longer afraid of her.
Dorothy was roused from her abstraction by hearing herself addressed as Cousin Dorothy by Lonsdale. He was in a corner with Sylvia, and they were amusing themselves, presumably at her expense; Dorothy darted an angry look at Sylvia, who shook her head with so mocking a disclaimer that Dorothy gave up the notion of confiding in her old friend. Sylvia evidently still regarded her with hostility and contempt, and was as ready to pour ridicule upon her now as she used to be in the dressing-room on tour. On tour! The days on tour crowded upon her memory. From the corner where Sylvia and Lonsdale were chatting she heard Lily"s name mentioned. What was that? Lily had married a croupier in Rio de Janeiro? But how unimportant it was who married what in this world. After so short a time, life lost its tender hues of sunrise or sunset and became garish or dim. On tour! The funny old life trickled confusedly past her vision like a runaway film, and she took Olive"s hand affectionately. Olive was as sympathetic as if she had never been treated so heartlessly that day in Brighton, as eager to hear that Dorothy was happy, as eager to accept her a.s.surances that she was. Tears stood in her eyes when she was told about the baby; but somehow her sympathy was not enough for Dorothy, who only awarded her a half-hearted sort of confidence that was sentimentalized to suit the listener. If she could have confided in Sylvia she would have told the story without sparing herself, but Sylvia had snubbed her; and, anyway, the past was not to be recaptured by talking about it.
Notwithstanding Sylvia"s indifference, Dorothy went out of her way to invite her often to Curzon Street that autumn and early winter. She was fascinated by her play at baccarat and _chemin de fer_; she wondered upon what mysterious capital she was drawing, for, though her name was not coupled with any man who would pay her debts, she was apparently able to lose as much money as she chose. It seemed impossible that it should be her own money; but so many things about Sylvia seemed impossible. In January Olive showed symptoms of a tendency to consumption; Sylvia, without waiting an instant to win back any of her losses, took her off to Italy for a long rest.
"_I_ despise Tony, and _she_ despises me," Dorothy thought. "But isn"t she right?"
She looked round her at the drawing-room of 129 Curzon Street, where in a foliage of tobacco smoke the faces of the gamblers stared out like fruit, and upon the green tablecloth the cards lay like fallen petals.
Was not Sylvia right to despise her for encouraging Mrs. Mainwaring and Captain Keith and Mrs. Foster-ffrench and half a dozen others like them?
Was not Sylvia right to despise her for setting out as a countess so haughtily and coming down to this? How she must have laughed when Olive told her about the parting in Brighton, and how little she would believe her tales of rural triumphs like the meet at Five Tree Farm. Sylvia probably considered that she had found her true level in seeing that her gambling guests were kept well supplied with refreshments.
In March even Clarehaven grew tired of baccarat with Captain Keith and the rest of them, and one morning a big new six-cylinder Lee-Lonsdale was driven up to 129 Curzon Street by the junior member of the firm, who wanted to advertise his wares on the Continent. Clarehaven"s man and Dorothy"s maid took the heavy luggage by train; the car with Dorothy, Lonsdale, Clarehaven, and a chauffeur swept like an arpeggio the road from London to Dover, transhipped to Calais, and made a touring-car record from Paris to Monte Carlo, whence Lonsdale, after booking some orders, returned to England without it. Tony lost five thousand pounds at roulette, a small portion of which he recovered over pigeons. He would probably have lost much more had not Dorothy told him, on a rose-hung night of stars and lamplight, that she was going to have another baby and that she must go back to Clare.
The prospective father was so pleased with the news that he set out to beat the record established by Lonsdale on the way down, drove into a poplar-tree, and smashed the car. Dorothy had a miscarriage and lay ill for a month at a small village between Gren.o.ble and Lyons. Tony was penitent; but he was obviously bored by having to spend this idle month in France, and as soon as Dorothy was well enough to travel and he had a.s.sured himself that she was not nervous after the accident, he drove northward faster than ever. They reached Clare at the end of May.
II
The bluebells were out when Dorothy came home, their pervasive sweetness sharpened by the pungency of young bracken; even as sometimes the heavenly clouds imitate the hills and valleys of earth or lie about at sunset like islands in a luminous and windless ocean, so now earth imitated heaven, and the bluebells lay along the woodland like drifts of sky. May was not gone when Dorothy came back; the cuckoo was not even yet much out of tune; the fallow deer did not yet display all their snowy summer freckles; the whitethroat still sang to his lady sitting close in the nettles by the orchard"s edge; apple-blossom was still strewn upon the lengthening gra.s.s; the orange-tip still danced along the glades; the red and white candles upon the horse-chestnuts were not yet burned out. It was still May; but June like a grave young matron stood close at hand, and May like a girl grown tired of her flowers and of her finery would presently fall asleep in her arms. And like the merry month Dorothy pillowed her head upon the green lap of June. For several weeks she made no allusion to the accident on the way home from Monte Carlo; nor, beyond the perpetually manifest joy she took in the seasonable pageant, did she give any sign of her distaste for the way she and Tony had spent the past year. The problem of what was to happen next autumn was not yet ripe for discussion, and in order to enjoy fully the present peace Dorothy persuaded Clarehaven to accept an invitation to go fishing in Norway, after which he would camp with the yeomanry for three weeks; and then another year would have to be catered for so that not one minute of it should be wasted--in other words, that it should be squeezed as dry as an orange to extract from it the last drop of pleasure. Tony wanted her to come with him to Norway, but she made her health an excuse and sent him off alone.
In July the countess and the dowager were pacing the turf that ran by the edge of that famous golden border now in its prime. The rich light of the summer afternoon flattered the long line of ma.s.sed hues which had been so artfully contrived. The unfamiliar beauty of the bronzed Himalayan asphodels, of citron kniphofias from Abyssinia and sulphur-lilies from the Caucasus, of ixias tawny as their own African lions, of canary-colored Mexican tigridias and primrose-hooded gladioli that bloom in the rain forest of the Victoria Falls, mingled with the familiar forms of lemon-pale hollyhocks and snapdragons, with violas apricot-stained, and with many common yellow flowers of cottage gardens to which the nurserymen had imparted a subtle and aristocratic shade.
"What a success your golden border has been," the dowager exclaimed.
Dorothy felt suddenly that she could not any longer tolerate such compliments. The life-blood of her marriage seemed to be running dry before her eyes while she was amusing herself with golden borders, and she wanted her mother-in-law to understand how critical the position was, and what disasters lurked in the future while the sun flattered the flowers, and she flattered her son"s wife.
"I"m going to be very frank," Dorothy began. "I want to know more about Tony"s father."
The dowager with a look of alarm leaned over the border to hide her embarra.s.sment.
"My dear," she said, "how cleverly you"ve combined this little St.-John"s-wort with these copper-colored rock-roses. They look delightful together."
"Why did you marry him?" Dorothy asked.
"Dorothy! Such a question, but really, I suppose--well, I don"t know. I suppose really because he asked me."
"Your mother didn"t insist upon it?"
"Well, of course, my mother didn"t oppose it," the dowager admitted.
"No, certainly not ... she didn"t actually oppose it; in fact possibly ... yes ... well.... I think one might almost say that she.... Oh, aren"t these trolliums gorgeous? They are trolliums, aren"t they? I always get confused between trilliums and trolliums?"