The Rubicon Part 13

"It will be a fine sight if she does; she will teach all these bloodless people how to do it. I think she has more force than anyone I know. Does she ever talk to you about her marriage?"

"Oh! there's nothing in the world she doesn't talk about. She has begun to take an immense interest in herself, as well as in other people, and she watches her own development with much entertainment. She never forces anything; she quietly waits till the change is made, and then finds out exactly what has happened."

"Her scene with old Lady Hayes must have been wicked," said Mrs.

Davenport. "I can imagine her so well, lolling back in her chair with infinite languor, smoking cigarettes probably, and uttering slow, polished blasphemies about all her mother-in-law's most cherished beliefs."

"They are out in Algiers now," said Percy. "Eva suddenly expressed a wish to go there again. She likes the languid heat of the place. Jim Armine is with them."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Davenport, softly. "She is very cruel."

"She had the greatest distaste for her ordinary home life. Last year my father lost a lot of money, and we had to live very quietly at home in the country and retrench. Eva couldn't endure it. She had quite made up her mind that she would never fall in love at all. She will do something sublime if she does. She is quite capable of sacrificing herself or anybody else."

"A clear stage and a crowd to see," thought Mrs. Davenport, "and may I be in the stalls."

Meanwhile, the two lovers were talking at the very farthest corner of the drawing-room, but before the evening was over, the little cloud, which had just appeared over the horizon on the occasion when Reggie's mother had lost her way in the snow, gathered again, and this time it seemed to Gertrude to leave a little film of mist behind. Like the other two, they had been talking about Percy's sister, and Reggie had said suddenly,--

"She is perfectly lovely, I believe; they call her the most beautiful woman in London. Percy showed me her photograph. I want to see her very much."

This speech, made in absolute thoughtlessness, jarred somehow on Gertrude's sensibilities.

"I daresay there are many actresses as beautiful," she said, rather unnecessarily. "I don't think I should like her a bit. There was a man staying with us the other day who said she was perfectly reckless about what she did."

"Oh! a woman as beautiful as that can afford to be reckless," said Reggie. "She sets the fashion."

"I don't think recklessness is a good fashion to set, then," said Gertrude, with some asperity.

"Oh! nor do I," said Reggie. "I only meant that one excuses it more, somehow."

"I don't see why you should excuse it because a woman is beautiful,"

said she, seeing the cloud rising out of the sea.

"I don't know," said Reggie. "You must take a person all round; beauty is an advantage, and you set it off against a corresponding disadvantage."

"Do you mean that an incomparably beautiful woman is excusable if she does unpardonably nasty things?"

"I suppose it comes to that in extremities," said he, doubtfully. "You see, it is impossible to believe that such a woman could do anything quite unpardonable."

"Reggie, you're absurd," she cried; "don't talk such utter nonsense, and be thankful I don't believe you mean what you say."

Reggie turned round in surprise.

"Why, Gerty, what's the matter?" he asked.

"You hurt me when you talk like that," she said.

"Oh! what have I been saying?" said he, with an air of perplexity. "You know the worst of me is, I never know what I'm talking about. When I begin talking I get dreadfully puzzled."

"Most people explain what they mean by talking, not obscure it."

"Well, it's just the opposite way with me," said he, serenely. "I know what I think all right before I begin to say it, but as soon as I begin to say it, I begin not to know what I think."

This confident a.s.sertion failed to satisfy Gertrude.

"You said you didn't mind a woman being immoral, if she was only beautiful," she said.

"Oh! I never said a word about immorality," exclaimed Reggie. "I don't think it's right to talk about such things. Gerty, what _do_ you mean.

As if I should say such things to you, especially since I never think them at all."

The open candour of her lover's face had its due effect.

"Well, you're quite sure you meant nothing of the sort, are you?" she asked, ready to be mollified.

"Of course I am," said he with sincerity. "I don't understand what you mean."

"What did you say, then?"

The cloud had begun to drift, but the horizon was not clear yet.

"Oh! don't ask me," he said tragically. "I tell you I never know what I say, and I get so dreadfully confused. I said--Oh, Lord! what did I say.

I said that an ugly woman--oh, dear!--that an ugly woman can't do the things which, if a beautiful woman did, she wouldn't be thought a beast," he explained, with a fine disregard of coherency.

"Oh! but, Reggie, that's exactly what you said you didn't say."

"No, it isn't," said Reggie, who, though not exactly bored, wanted to talk about something else. "I said something about a beautiful woman being the fashion, which an ugly woman can't be."

"What do you mean by the fashion?"

"Why, I mean the fashion," said Reggie; "the rage, the _comme il_ something, the thing everybody else does--balloon sleeves and dachshunds, you know."

"Are you sure you only meant that sort of fashion?" asked she.

"Oh! yes, of course I am. Oh! do let's talk about something else."

But Gertrude was vaguely dissatisfied. The cloud had left a little drift of mist behind.

And Reggie? Well Reggie's cleanly, honest instincts gave him no directions on this subject; they drew in their feelers like sea anemones when a foreign substance touches them. A soul would have had a word or two to say to him about it, but Reggie unfortunately knew nothing about that.

They sat silent for a minute or two, Reggie trying to think of something to say which should be sufficiently remote from this puzzling topic, Gertrude still rather troubled in her mind. In after years, she remembered that night as the first occasion on which a certain, vague pain had begun, the first of a series of blind pangs that stirred a new sort of feeling in her, that tore asunder some fibre in her inmost being. An elegant musing over devotional books is, as I have mentioned before, the accredited source of such an awakening.

The unerring instinct of a lover in Reggie, divined, though very dimly, that some little change had taken place. He felt that Gertrude had felt something that he had not felt. In spite of his recent sense of irresponsibility, of utter contentedness on his own part, he could see that the edge had been taken, ever so slightly, off hers. You may observe something like this in the case of the more human animals. A dog sometimes will know that it does not understand, if the bond between itself and its human friend is very strong. Its inability to understand is something quite different; it is the knowledge of this inability that is rare, and Reggie felt this now.

As is natural, he recovered himself first. After a twinge of pain, one is p.r.o.ne to sit quiet a minute or two, and regain one's normal level.

But the pain had been all on one side, and Gertrude required a little s.p.a.ce to steady herself in.

"Gerty, let's play a game of some sort. Come and see what the others are going to do."

He got up and stood in front of her.