The Green Carnation Part 14

"My dear Reggie, women always expect something. Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations."

"Well, then," Reggie said petulantly, "what am I to do? Shall I ask her to take a walk, or what? I really can't put my arm round her waist. One owes something to oneself in spite of all the nonsense that Ibsen talks."

"One owes everything to oneself, and I also owe a great deal to other people--a great deal that I hope to live long enough never to repay. A debt of honour is one of the finest things in the world. The very name recalls a speech out of 'Guy Livingstone.' By the way, I sometimes wish that I had been born swart as he was. I should have pleased Miss Rhoda Broughton, and she is so deliciously prosaic. Is she not the woman who said that she was always inspired to a pun by the sight of a cancer hospital? or am I thinking of Helen Mathers? I can never tell them apart--their lack of style is so marvellously similar. Why do women always write in the present tense, Reggie? Is it because they have no past? To go about without a past, must be like going about without one's trousers. I should feel positively indecent."

"There is no such thing as indecency, Esme, just as there are no such things as right and wrong. There are only art and imbecility. But how shall I prepare for my proposal? What did you do?"

"I did nothing. My wife proposed to me, and I refused her. Then she went and put up some things called banns, I believe. Afterwards she sent me a white waistcoat in a brown paper parcel, and told me to meet her at a certain church on a certain day. I declined. She came in a hired carriage--a thing like a large deep bath, with two enormously fat parti-coloured horses--to fetch me. To avoid a scene I went with her, and I understand that we were married. But the colour of the window behind the altar was so atrocious, and the design--of Herodias carrying about the head of John the Baptist on a dish--so inartistically true to life, that I could not possibly attend to the service."

"Poor Esme," said Lord Reggie, in a tone charged with pathos, "I must trust in my intuitions, then?"

"That is like trusting in one's convictions, Reggie. For the sake of the stars do not be sensible. I would far rather see you lying in your grave. Trust rather in your emotions."

"But I have none about Lady Locke. How could you suppose so?"

"I never suppose. I leave that to the heads of departments when they are answering questions in the House. It is the privilege of incompetence to suppose. The artist will always know. But there is Lady Locke, Reggie, being sensible in the rose garden. What must the roses think of her? Go to her, Reggie, tell her that you do not love her, and will marry her.

That is what a true woman loves to hear."

As Lord Reggie went away, walking very delicately, with his head drooping towards his left shoulder, and his hands dangling in a dilettante manner at his sides, Madame Valtesi appeared at the French window of the drawing-room, refusing to join Tommy in some boyish game.

After a parleying, which she conducted in profile, she turned her full face round, and having shaken her tormentor off, she proceeded slowly towards Amarinth, with an expression of extreme and illimitable irritability.

"Children are more lacking in discernment than the beasts of the field,"

she said, as she came up to him. "That boy is actually vexed because I will not go and play at Tom Tiddler's Ground with him. He positively expected that I would be Tiddler! Tiddler! Did you ever hear of such a name? It sounds like one of d.i.c.kens' characters. He says that all you have to do is to run about! Give me the long chair, please. He has almost succeeded in making me feel like Tiddler. It is a dreadful sensation."

She fanned herself slowly and looked round.

"Who is that in the rose garden?" she asked, putting up her eyegla.s.s.

"Oh! Lady Locke and Lord Reggie--an ill-a.s.sorted couple. They ought to marry."

"Why, dear lady?" said Esme.

"Because they are ill-a.s.sorted. Affinities never marry nowadays. They always run away together and live on the Continent, waiting for decrees nisi. We repent of what we do so hastily nowadays. People divorce each other almost on sight. Will Lady Locke accept him?"

"Do widows ever refuse?"

"I am a widow."

"Indeed! I did not know it, or, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten. You are so delightfully married in your conduct."

"Was it Whistler who said that first?"

"No, I believe it comes originally from the Dutch. But it is my own adaptation, and I am too modest to put my name on a programme. Ah!

Madame Valtesi, why have I never set the world in a blaze? I have plied the bellows most industriously, and I have made the twigs crackle, yet the fire splutters a good deal. Perhaps I have too much genius. Can it be that? My good things are in everybody's mouth."

"That's just it. You ought to have swallowed a cork years and years ago."

"Like Mr. Henry James. I always know when he has thought of a clever thing at a party."

"How?"

"By his leaving it immediately, and in total silence. He rushes home to write his thought down. His memory is treacherous."

"And does he often have to leave a party?"

"Pretty often. About once a year, I believe."

"It must be very trying socially to be so clever. So Lord Reggie is actually serious?"

"I hope he is never that. He will marry, as he sins, prettily, with the gaiety of a young Greek G.o.d."

"Marry and not settle down, as we all do now? We have improved upon the old code."

"We have practically abolished codes in London. In the country I fancy they continue to think of the commandments. How many commandments are there?"

"I forget! Seven, I think, or is it seventeen? Probably seventeen. I know there are a great many. I heard of a clergyman in a Northern parish who took twenty minutes to read them, although he left out all the h's.

Lady Locke and Lord Reggie have wandered away. It is like the garden scene of 'Faust.' Martha ought to come on now with Mephistopheles. Ah!

here are Mrs. Windsor and tea. They will have to do instead."

Although Lord Reggie was such a novice in wooing, and would very much have preferred being wooed, he managed to convey to the mind of Lady Locke the notion that he had some vague intentions towards her. And that evening, as she dressed for dinner, she asked herself plainly what they were. That he loved her, she did not even for a moment imagine. She was not much given to self-deception. That he loved her money, a far more reasonable supposition as she mentally allowed--she did not really and honestly believe. For Lord Reggie, whatever were his faults, always conveyed the impression of being entirely thoughtless and improvident about worldly affairs. He had everything he wanted, naturally. Any other condition would have been wholly impossible to him, and would have seemed painfully out of place, and foreign to the scheme of the world, to those who knew him. But he never appeared to bother about any means for obtaining things, and Lady Locke thought him the last boy in the universe to lay a plot for the obtaining of a fortune. Had he, then, conceived a light pa.s.sing fancy for her? She thought this possible, though a little unlikely. He was so different from the other men whom she had known, that she could never "place" him, or feel that she knew at all what his mind was likely to do under given conditions, or in cut and dried situations. Undoubtedly he had begun to think about her as well as about himself, an unusual conjunction, which no one would have antic.i.p.ated. But exactly how he thought about her, Lady Locke could not tell; nor could she precisely tell either how she thought about him. He began to mean something to her. That was all she could say even to herself. She dressed for dinner very slowly that evening. Her window was open, and as she was pinning some yellow roses in the front of her gown, having dismissed her maid, she heard the piping, excited voice of Tommy asking a question of some hidden companion in the garden below.

"How does it get like that?" he exclaimed, with the penetrating squeak of a very young child. "I don't see. Does it grow?"

"No, Tommy," replied the soft voice of Lord Reggie, "nothing grows like that. It is too strange and beautiful to have grown."

"Well, then, Reggie, do they paint it?"

"Never mind how it is done. That is the mistake we continually make. If the dolls dance exquisitely we should ignore the man who pulls the wires. Results are everything. When we see you in that pretty ivory-coloured suit we are content that you are pretty; we don't wish to learn how every b.u.t.ton is b.u.t.toned, how every string is tied."

"There aren't any strings," cried Tommy. "Boys don't have strings."

"We don't care to find out how the tailor cuts and fashions, how he sews and st.i.tches. He does all this in order that you may be beautiful. And we have only to think of you. Do you love this carnation, Tommy, as I love it? Do you worship its wonderful green? It is like some exquisite painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. To-morrow I will give you a carnation, Tommy, and you shall wear it at church when you go to hear my beautiful anthem."

Tommy gave vent to ecstatic cries of joy.

Lady Locke, standing by the window, reddened all over her face, and a fire flashed suddenly in her usually calm and gentle eyes. She threw the yellow roses roughly down upon her dressing-table and went hastily out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. When she reached the drawing-room she called her boy in from the garden.

"Tommy," she said, "it is past eight. Run away to bed. You were very late last night."

The child immediately began to protest; but she cut him short.

"Off with you," she cried. "Make haste. I can see you are looking tired."

"I am not tired, mother," said the boy, preparing to whimper.

"Tired or not, you must go when I say it," answered Lady Locke, with a harshness such as she had never displayed before. "Don't dispute about the matter, but go straight off. My boy must be like a soldier and obey the orders of his superior officer. I am your superior officer."

She pointed to the door, and Tommy departed reluctantly, with a very red face, and the menacing expression of an angry, governed child.

Lord Reggie came in from the garden. He found Lady Locke apparently immersed in the foreign intelligence of the _Times_ Supplement.