The Cords of Vanity Part 26

"_As You Like It_?" I queried, obtusely.

"Yes--since it wasn't, for her."

It is unwholesome to lie on the ground after sunset.

4

"I had rather a scene with Alfred yesterday morning. He said you drank, and gambled, and were always running after--people, and weren't in fine, a desirable person for me to know. He insinuated, in fact, that you were a villain of the very deepest and non-crocking dye. He told me of instances. His performance would have done credit to Ananias. I was _mad_! So I gave him his old ring back, and told him things I can't tell _you_,--no, not just yet, dear. He is rather like a m.u.f.fin, isn't he?" she said, with the lightest possible little laugh--"particularly like one that isn't quite done."

"Oh, Rosalind," I babbled, "I mean to prove that you were right. And I _will_ prove it, too!"

And indeed I meant all that I said--just then.

Rosalind said: "Oh, Jaques, Jaques! what a child you are!"

19.

_He Plays the Improvident Fool_

Now was I come near to the summit of my desires, and advantageously betrothed to a girl with whom I was, in any event, almost in love; but I presently ascertained, to my dismay, that sophisticated, "proper"

little Rosalind was thoroughly in love with me, and always in the back of my mind this knowledge worried me.

Imprimis, she persisted in calling me Jaques, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of that time wherein I was called Jack. Yet my objection to this silly nickname was a mischancy matter to explain. There was no way of telling her that I disliked anything which reminded me of Gillian Hardress, without telling more about Gillian than would be pleasant to tell. So Rosalind went on calling me Jaques; and I was compelled to put up with a trivial and unpremeditated, but for all that a daily, annoyance; and I fretted under it.

Item, she insisted on presenting me with all sorts of expensive knick-knacks, and being childishly grieved when I remonstrated.

"But I have the money," Rosalind would say, "and you haven't. So why shouldn't I? And besides, it's really only selfishness on my part, because I like doing things for you, and _if_ you liked doing things for me, Jaques, you'd understand."

So I would eventually have to swear that I did like "doing things" for her; and it followed--somehow--that in consequence she had a perfect right to give me anything she wanted to.

And this too fretted me, mildly, all the summer I spent at Birnam Beach with Rosalind and with the opulent friends of Rosalind's aunt from St.

Louis.... They were a queer lot. They all looked so unspeakably new; their clothes were spick and span, and as expensive as possible, but that was not it; even in their bathing suits these middle-aged people--they were mostly middle-aged--seemed to have been very recently finished, like animated waxworks of middle-aged people just come from the factory. And they spent money in a continuous careless way that frightened me.

But I was on my very best, most dignified behavior; and when Aunt Lora presented me as "one of the Lichfield Townsends, you know," these brewers and breweresses appeared to be properly impressed. One of them--actually--"supposed that I had a coat-of-arms"; which in Lichfield would be equivalent to "supposing" that a gentleman possessed a pair of trousers. But they were really very thoughtful about never letting me pay for anything; in this regard there seemed afoot a sort of friendly conspiracy.

So the summer pa.s.sed pleasantly enough; and we bathed, and held hands in the moonlight, and danced at the Casino, and rode the merry-go-round, and played ping-pong, and read _Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall_,--which was much better, I told everybody, than that idiotic George Clock book, _The Imperial Votaress_. And we drank interminable suissesses, and it was all very pleasant.

Yet always in the rear of my mind was stirring restively the instinct to get back to my writing; and these sedately frolicsome benevolent people--even Rosalind--plainly thought that "writing things" was just the unimportant foible of an otherwise fine young fellow.

2

And in September Rosalind came to visit her Aunt Marcia in Lichfield, to get clothes and all other matters ready for our wedding in November; and Lichfield, as always, made much of Rosalind, and she had the honor of "leading" the first Lichfield German with Colonel Rudolph Musgrave.

My partner at that dance was the Marquise d'Arlanges....

I was seeing a deal of the Marquise d'Arlanges. She was Stella's only sister, as you may remember, and was that autumn paying a perfunctory visit to her parents--the second since her marriage.

I shall not expatiate, however, concerning Madame la Marquise. You have doubtless heard of her. For Lizzie has not, even yet, found a time wherein to be idle; she has been busied since the hour of her birth in acquiring first, plain publicity, and then social power, and every other amenity of life in turn. I had not the least doubt even then of her ending where she is now....

She was at this time still well upon the preferable side o! thirty, and had no weaknesses save a liking for gossip, cigarettes, and admiration.

Lizzie was never the woman to marry a Peter Blagden. Once Stella was settled, Lizzie Musgrave had sailed for Europe, and eventually had arrived at Monaco with an apologetic mother, several letters of introduction, and a Scotch terrier; and had established herself at the Hotel de la Paix, to look over the "available" supply of n.o.blemen in reduced circ.u.mstances. Before the end of a month Miss Musgrave had reached a decision, had purchased her Marquis, much as she would have done any other trifle that took her fancy, and had shipped her mother back to America. Lizzie retained the terrier, however, as she was honestly attached to it.

Her marriage had been happy, and she found her husband on further acquaintance, as she told me, a mild-mannered and eminently suitable person, who was unaccountably addicted to playing dominoes, and who spent a great deal of money, and dined with her occasionally. In a sentence, the marquise was handsome, "had a tongue in her head," and, to utilise yet another ancient phrase, was as hard as nails.

And yet there was a family resemblance. Indeed, in voice and feature she was strangely like an older Stella; and always I was cheating myself into a half-belief that this woman I was talking with was Stella; and Lizzie would at least enable me to forget, for a whole half-hour sometimes, that Stella was dead....

"I must thank you," I said, one afternoon, when I arose to go, "for a most pleasant dream of--what we'll call the Heart's Desire. I suppose I have been rather stupid, Lizzie; and I apologise for it; but people are never exceedingly hilarious in dreams, you know."

She said, very gently: "I understand. For I loved Stella too. And that is why the room is never really lighted when you come. Oh, you stupid man, how could I have _helped_ knowing it--that all the love you have made to me was because you have been playing I was Stella? That knowledge has preserved me, more than once, my child, from succ.u.mbing to your illicit advances in this dead Lichfield."

And I was really astonished, for she was not by ordinary the sort of woman who consents to be a makeshift.

I said as much, "And it _has_ been a comfort, Lizzie, because she doesn't come as often now, for some reason--"

"Why--what do you mean?"

The room was very dark, lit only by the steady, comfortable glow of a soft-coal fire. For it was a little after sunset, and outside, carriages were already rumbling down Regis Avenue, and people were returning from the afternoon drive. I could not see anything distinctly, excepting my own hands, which were like gold in the firelight; and so I told her all about _The Indulgences of Ole-Luk-Ole_.

"She came, that first time, over the crest of a tiny upland that lay in some great forest,--Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn, for the gra.s.s was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first thought, as I now remember, was how in the d.i.c.kens could any mediaeval lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a woman of the Middle Ages.

"Only her features were those of Stella, and the eyes of this woman were filled with an unutterable happiness and fear, as she came toward me,--just as the haunting eyes of Stella were upon the night she married Peter Blagden, and I babbled nonsense to the moon.

"'Oh, I have wanted you,--I have wanted you!' she said; and afterward, unarithmeticably dimpling, just as she used to do, you may remember: _'Depardieux,_ messire! have you then forgotten that upon this forenoon we hunt the great boar?"

"'Stella!' I said, 'O dear, dear Stella! what does it mean?'

"'You silly! it means, of course, that Ole-Luk-Oie is kind, and has put us both into the glaze of the mustard-jar--only I wonder which one we have gotten into?' Stella said. 'Don't you remember them, dear--the blue mustard-jar and the red one your Mammy had that summer at the Green Chalybeate, with men on them hunting a boar?'

"'They stood, one on each corner of the mantelpiece,' I said; 'and in the blue one she kept matches, and in the other--'

"'She kept b.u.t.tons in the red one,' said Stella,--'big, shiny white b.u.t.tons, with four holes in them, that had come off your underclothes, and were to be sewed on again. One day you swallowed one of 'em, I remember, because you _would_ keep it in your mouth while you swung in the hammock. And you thought it would surely kill you, so you knelt down in the dry leaves and prayed G.o.d He wouldn't let it kill you.'

"'But you weren't there,' I protested; 'n.o.body was there. So n.o.body ever knew anything about it, though may be you--' For I had just remembered that Stella was dead, only I knew it was against some rule to mention it.

"'Well, at any rate I'm _here_,' said Stella, 'and Ole-Luk-Oie is kind; and we had better go and hunt the great boar at once, I suppose, since that is what the people on the mustard-jars always do.'

"'But how did you come hither, O my dear--?'

"'Why, through your wanting me so much,' she said. 'How else?'

"And I understood....