Wyllard's Weird

CHAPTER VII.

THE GENERAL RECEIVES A SUMMONS

While Bothwell was working out the scheme of an industrious unpretentious life, to be spent with the woman he loved on that wild Cornish coast on which he had been reared, and which was to him as a passion, Lady Valeria Harborough was shining in the county and military society within twenty miles of Plymouth – admired, envied, to outward seeming the most fortunate of women. She went everywhere, she received every one worth receiving. She had brought something of the easy manners, the unceremonious gaiety, of Simla to her Devonshire villa. Her afternoon parties were the liveliest in the neighbourhood. Her weekly musical evenings were the rage. She engaged the best professional talent obtainable for these evenings. She rigidly eschewed the amateur element. She selected music and songs with an extraordinary tact, and contrived that no hackneyed composition should be ever heard at her parties. The newest ballads, the last successes in modern classical music, were first revealed to county society at Fox Hill. There people heard the gavotte that was going to be fashionable, the song that was to be the rage next season. And on these evenings, when the flowery corridors and the long suite of rooms were filled with guests, when the spacious music-room, with its two grand pianos and magnificent organ, was thrown open to the crowd, Lady Valeria circulated amidst the throng, a queen among women, not so beautiful as the fairest of her guests, but by far the most attractive of them all. There was a subtle charm in those dreamy eyes and in that languid smile. Beardless subalterns worshipped her as if she had been a goddess; and many a man, who could hardly have been included in Lady Valeria's list of "nice boys," felt his heart beat faster as she lingered by his side for a few minutes. She had a smile and a word for every one who crossed her threshold; the most insignificant guest was greeted and remembered. She seemed a woman who lived only for society, who had fulfilled her mission when she had been admired. The General was proud of his young wife's success, delighted that his house should be known as the pleasantest in the county. He could afford that money should be spent as if it were water. He never complained of the expenses of his establishment, but he knew the cost of everything, and paid all accounts with his own cheques. Unluckily for Lady Valeria, old habits of strict accountancy, acquired in the early days when he was adjutant of his regiment, had clung to him. He liked accounts, and was in some measure his own house-steward. There was no possibility of Lady Valeria's gambling debts being paid out of the domestic funds. Everything was done on a large scale, but by line and rule. A royal household could not have been managed more rigidly. Thus it was that Lady Valeria's money difficulties were very real difficulties; and it was only by a full confession of her folly that she could have obtained her husband's help.

It was just this confession, this humiliation, to which Lady Valeria could not bring herself. Candour was the very last virtue to which she inclined. She had not been brought up in the school of truth. Her father had been a tyrant, her mother a dealer in expedients, a diplomatist, a marvel of tact and cleverness, able to achieve wonders in domestic management and in social policy. But life at Carlavarock Castle had been a constant strain, and duplicity had become an instinct with mother and children. There had been always something to hide from the Earl – a son's debts, a daughter's flirtation, a milliner's bill, a debt of honour. Valeria had been oppressed with gambling debts before she was twenty. She had played deep, and borrowed money in her first season. She had married, hoping that General Harborough's wealth would be hers to spend as she pleased; but in this she had been disappointed. She had married the most generous of men; but she had married a man of business. He made a magnificent settlement before marriage; he made a will after marriage, leaving the bulk of his fortune to his young wife, to be hers, and in her own control, if there were no children – hers without an embargo against a second marriage. She had pin-money that would have been a liberal allowance for a countess; but she had not the handling of her husband's income. She could not have cheated him out of a five-pound note. He had told her in the beginning of their married life that it would be so. He was a man of business, and she was too young to be troubled with the sordid details of domestic life.

"Order what you like, love. Make our home as beautiful as you can. I will pay your bills, and take care that you are not cheated by your tradesmen."

At the outset Lady Valeria had accepted this arrangement as altogether delightful; but there came a time when she found that it had its inconveniences.

To-night, in the balmy September weather, the windows of the villa were all open to the sky and the garden, open to the music of the distant sea, and Lady Valeria was sitting in the verandah where a week ago she had bidden farewell to Bothwell Grahame. It was nearly midnight, and the crowd was concentrated in the music-room, where Herr Stahlmann was playing a new Sauterelle on his violoncello. The moon was shining over the sea yonder, gleaming upon the long white line of the breakwater; and the distant view of town and harbour looked even more Italian than in the daytime. Lady Valeria wore a long flowing gown of an almost Grecian simplicity, a gown of dead-white cashmere, bordered with a marvellous embroidery of peacocks' feathers, which fell in a slanting line from shoulder to hem, the brilliant colouring flashing in the moonlight, as the wearer slowly fanned herself with a large peacock-feather fan.

"Are you not afraid to wear so many peacocks' feathers?" asked a gentleman who was sitting at her elbow, a handsome man of about forty – a man who was not altogether good style in dress or manner, but who had a certain ease and authority which indicated good birth and the habits of fashionable society.

This was Sir George Varney, a personage in the racing world, but reputed to have been utterly broken for the last three years. In the racing world there is always a chance so long as a man can keep his head above water; and Sir George might still have a future before him. Although he was supposed to have spent his last farthing and mortgaged his last acre, he always contrived to get money when he wanted it; and he had contrived to lend money to Lady Valeria.

"Why should I not wear peacocks' feathers?" Lady Valeria asked languidly.

Her profile was turned to him, her eyes were looking towards the line of moonlight on the sea, the white walls of barracks and storehouses. She did not take the trouble to turn her face to her companion as she spoke to him. Pale, languid, dreamy, she seemed the very image of indifference.

"Because they are considered so" – casting about for a mild expression – "confoundedly unlucky. I remember the morning of the Oaks, the year my Cherryripe shut up like a telescope half a furlong from the winning-post, my sister Grace drove up to Hatchett's to meet the drag – I was to drive her and a lot of 'em to Epsom, don't you know – with an infernal pork-pie hat made out of a peacock's breast. 'What did you wear that damn thing for?' I asked. 'Because it's the fashion,' says she. 'Shouldn't wonder if my mare lost the race on account of your damn tile,' says I. Grace chaffed me for my superstition; but the mare made a most unaccountable mess of herself, don't you know, and the Devil himself or that peacock-feather hat must have been at the bottom of it."

"I don't think the peacocks' feathers will make any difference to me," replied Valeria wearily. "I have been unlucky all my life."

"Well, Fate has been rather hard upon you," said Sir George, drawing his chair a little nearer to hers, gazing at the delicate profile with a more ardent look than was quite within the lines of friendship and good-fellowship. "A beautiful young woman married to a man old enough to be her grandfather, carried off to broil away her existence in Bengal, when she ought to have been one of the queens of London society – stinted to a bare allowance of pin-money, hardly enough to pay her dressmaker, by Jove, when she ought to have had the command of her husband's purse. Why not cut the whole business, Valeria, and go to the south of France with me, directly after the Newmarket week? I stand to win a pot of money, and we can spend it merrily at Monaco. I know how to make plenty more when that's gone. And by and by, when the General goes off the hooks, we can make things fair and square with the world – or before, if you'd rather not wait. The thing can be so easily managed. Look at your cousin, Lady Cassandra, and the Colonel, and the Duke and his Countess – change of partners all round."

He tried to encircle the slim waist with his strong arm – the arm of a man who had won cups at Lillie Bridge in days gone by – but Valeria snatched herself from him with a disdainful laugh, rose from her chair, and walked to the other end of the verandah, he following her, sorely disconcerted. He had been watching for his opportunity, and he fancied the opportunity had come. He had neither creed nor principles of his own, and he believed that people who pretended to be better than himself were all hypocrites. Like Dumas' hero, he was ready to admit that there might be good women in the world, only he had never happened to meet with one.

He had made himself useful to Lady Valeria: had told her what horses to back, and had helped her to win a good deal of money since her return to England. Her losses had been the result of her own inspirations: and of late, when she had so lost, Sir George had found her the money to settle with the bookmen. And having done all this, and having devoted all his leisure to the cultivation of Lady Valeria's acquaintance, he deemed that the time was ripe for him to ask her to run away with him. He had run away with so many women in the course of the last twenty years that his manner of proposing the thing had become almost a formula. He modified his appeal according to the rank of the adored one – had his first, second, and third class supplications; but it was not in his nature to be poetical. Had he been making love to an empress, he could not have risen to any loftier height than that which he had reached to-night.

Lady Valeria turned at the end of the verandah, and faced him deliberately in the bright, cold moonlight, a white and ghostlike figure, with pale face and flashing eyes. She measured him from head to foot with a look of unqualified scorn; gazed at him steadily, with eyes that seemed to read all the secrets of his evil life; and then, slowly unfurling her peacock fan, she broke into a silvery laugh, long and clear and sweet, but with a ring of contemptuousness in its every note.

"You are mistaken, Sir George," she said quietly, moving towards the open window of the corridor, as if to return to the house. "Your almost infallible judgment is at fault. I am not that kind of person."

She would have passed him and gone into the house, but he put himself between her and the open window. He barred her way with all the hulk of his handsome, over-dressed person. That ringing laughter, the insolent sparkle in her magnificent eyes, goaded him to madness. Sir George had a diabolical temper, and the insensate vanity of a successful roué. That any woman could really despise him was beyond his power of belief; but a woman who pretended to despise him put herself beyond the pale of his courtesy.

"No," he muttered savagely. "You are not that kind of person. You are not that kind of person for me, because for the last three years you have been that kind of person for somebody else. I thought you must have been tired of Bothwell Grahame by this time, and that I should have had my chance."

In a breath, as if from the stroke of a Cyclops hammer, George Varney had measured his length upon the tesselated pavement under the verandah. It was an old man's arm that felled him; but an athlete of five-and-twenty could not have struck a firmer blow.

General Harborough had stolen into the gardens to smoke a solitary cigar, while Herr Stahlmann played his Sauterelle, and, coming quietly round the house, he had approached the verandah just in time to hear Sir George's last speech. He had not hesitated a minute as to the manner of his answer.

"Go to your guests, Valeria," he said, with quiet command; "I will see to this blackguard."

Valeria obeyed half mechanically. The shock of those last few moments had made thought impossible. Her mind seemed to have suddenly become a blank. She went through the brilliant rooms, wondering at the lights and flowers and smartly-dressed people, seeing everything vaguely, with a puzzled doubtfulness as to her own identity. She talked and laughed with more than usual animation for the rest of the evening. She had a friendly smile and a pleasant word for each departing guest. She enchanted the artists by her appreciation of their work; yet she had no more consciousness of what she said or to whom she spoke than a condemned criminal might have on the eve of his execution.

It was nearly two o'clock when she went to her own rooms – those spacious rooms, with their windows looking different ways, over hill and valley, town and sea; rooms beautified by all that art and wealth can compass in the way of luxury; rooms in which she had sat hour after hour, day after day, brooding treason, caring more for one look from Bothwell's dark eyes than for all that glory of sea and land, for all the luxuries with which an adoring husband had surrounded her.

She had seen the General moving about among his guests at the last. She had heard the strong cheery tones of his voice as he parted with some particular friend; and now she wondered if she would find him in her morning-room, where on such a night as this they had been wont to spend half an hour in light, careless talk, after the people were gone, he sitting out on the balcony, perhaps, smoking a final cigar.

Yes, he was there before her, sitting on a sofa, in a meditative attitude, with his elbow on his knee, far from the lamp, with its low, spreading shade, a lamp which shed a brilliant light upon Lady Valeria's own particular writing-table, and left all the rest of the room in shadow.

Then at the sight of that familiar figure, the bent head, the honoured gray hairs, all the horror of the scene in the verandah flashed back upon her. The unmitigated insult of Sir George's speech, such insult as might have been flung at the lowest woman in London, speech shaped just as it might have been shaped for such an one. That she, Lady Valeria Harborough, should have such dirt cast in her face, and that the man who had so spoken could live to tell other men what he had said, to boast of himself at the clubs!