Where Love Is. William John Locke

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Chapter III—A MODERN BETROTHAL

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      A YOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o'clock, throwing over her evening's engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else's box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King's arrival.

      This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.

      She threw down her book and went on to the balcony, where, on this close summer night, she could breathe a little cool air. A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half-hour. Morland was to come at ten. She longed for, yet dreaded, his coming; regretted that she had stayed away from the opera, where, after all, she could have observed the everlasting human comedy. She had dined early; the evening had been interminable; she felt nervous, and raged at her weakness. She was tired, out of harmony with herself, fretfully conscious too of the jarring notes in a room furnished by uneducated people of sudden wealth. The Wolff-Salamons, out of the kindness of their shrewd hearts, had offered the house for the season to the Hardacres, who had accepted the free quarters with profuse expressions of gratitude; which, however, did not prevent Mr. Hardacre from railing at the distance of the house (which was in Holland Park) from his club, or his wife from deprecating to her friends her temporary residence in what she was pleased to term the Ghetto. Nor did the Wolff-Salamons' generosity mitigate the effect of their furniture on Norma's nerves. When Jimmie's phrase came into her head with the suddenness of a mosquito, she could bear the room no longer.

      She sat on the balcony and waited for Morland. There at least she was free from the flaring gold and blue, and the full-length portrait of the lady of the house, on which with delicate savagery the eminent painter had catalogued all the shades of her ancestral vulgarity. Perhaps it was this portrait that had brought back the irony of Jimmie's tribute. The poem of her life! She sat with her chin on her palm, thinking bitterly of circumstance. She had never been happy, had grown to disbelieve in so absurd and animal a state. It had always been the same, as far back as she could remember. Her childhood: nurses and governesses—a swift succession of the latter till she began to regard them as remote from her inner life as the shop girl or railway guard with whom she came into casual contact. The life broken by visits abroad to fashionable watering or gambling places where she wandered lonely and proud, neglected by her parents, watching with keen eyes and imperturbable face the frivolities, the vices, the sordidnesses, taking them all in, speculating upon them, resolving some problems unaided and storing up others for future elucidation. Her year at the expensive finishing school in Paris where the smartest daughters of America babbled and chattered of money, money, till the air seemed unfit for woman to breathe unless it were saturated with gold dust. As hers was not, came discontent and overweening ambitions. Yet the purity was not all killed. She remembered her first large dinner-party. The same Lord Wyniard of the unclean scandal had taken her down. He was thirty years older than she, and an unsavoury reputation had reached even her young ears. The man regarded her with the leer of a satyr. She realised with a shudder for the first time the meaning of a phrase she had constantly met with in French novels—“il la dévêtit de ses yeux.” His manner was courtly, his air of breeding perfect; yet he managed to touch her fingers twice, and he sought to lead her on to dubious topics of conversation. She was frightened.

      In the drawing-room, seeing him approach, she lost her head, took shelter with her mother, and trembling whispered to her, “Don't let that man come and talk to me again, mother, he's a beast.” She was bidden not to be a fool. The man had a title and twenty thousand a year, and she had evidently made an impression. A week afterwards her mother invited a bishop and his wife and Lord Wyniard to dinner, and Lord Wyniard took Norma down again. And that was her start in the world. She had followed the preordained course till now, with many adventures indeed by the way, but none that could justify the haunting phrase—the poem of her life!

      Was the man such a fool, after all? Was it even ignorance on his part? Was it not, rather, wisdom on a lofty plane immeasurably above the commonplaces of ignorance and knowledge? The questions presented themselves to her vaguely. She was filled with a strange unrest, a craving for she knew not what. Yet she would shortly have in her grasp all—or nearly all—that she had aimed at in life. She counted the tale of her future possessions—houses, horses, diamonds, and the like. She seemed to have owned them a thousand years.

      The clock in the house chimed ten in a pretentious musical way, which irritated her nerves. The silence after the last of the ten inexorable tinkles fell gratefully. Then she realised that in a minute or СКАЧАТЬ